Mike

Astronomer: Saving Megabux with SQL and SimKube Ok, folks, get ready, this is a fun one!

Ok my blog post about my work with Astronomer is public now, go read it!

blog.appliedcomputing.io/p/astronomer...

AWS keeps sending me messages for "next generation firewalls", but they abbreviate it as NGFW, and i can't help but see "not gonna fucking work"

London Calling probably. Still good 45 years later

Vibe Coding: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Picture Me Coding This week we host our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey to talk about their experiences building applications with AI tools.  Both Bob and Kevin are very tech savvy in different ways, but neit...

This week we talk to our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey about their experiences building software with AI tools. While tech-savvy, neither are full-time developers, so they have an interesting perspective on the good and bad parts of vibe coding: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Well, I certainly have a face for radio

Air travel is the worst thing that I intentionally inflict on myself, and I say that as someone who has trained for and run ultra-marathons

MJ Lenderman, Sun June, and More Cover Jason Molina Songs for New Tribute Album I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina also features Hand Habits, Advance Base, Friendship, and others

pitchfork.com/news/mj-lend...

Friends and Relations - Picture Me Coding We're talking about databases again.  Or database management systems, we're not totally sure.  In any case, they are relational databases (or database management systems).The relational data...

This episode we're talking about databases again, specifically relational databases (or relational database management systems, we're not sure) www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I love it when the names of the teams in basketball games make a fun adjective/noun pairing. My current favorites are Thunder Nuggets and Fever Dream, but Jazz Grizzlies has potential.

Assuming that it doesn't wreck your business an AI-caused outage teaches some good lessons

Shoulders of Giants: Jim Gray - Picture Me Coding Jim Gray was a key innovator in the area of database technology and he won the Turing Prize in 1998.  He was particularly influential with respect to the definition and formalization of transacti...

We kick off a series of episodes on database technology with a discussion of the late, great Jim Gray, winner of the 1998 Turing Prize and the person most responsible for the concept of database transactions. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Spanish mathematician Javier Gómez Serrano and Google DeepMind team up to solve the Navier-Stokes million-dollar problem A team of researchers and engineers has been secretly working for three years on one of humanity’s most devilish enigmas, the solution of which is considered imminent thanks to artificial intelligence

english.elpais.com/science-tech...

My challenge to you is to talk about it (more). Talk about climate change. Talk about the importance of the scientific infrastructure in the US. Talk about the implications of these cuts on the economy, our health, public safety, the environment, and what this means for the next generation as well.

Been reading a book about the 14th c. I think the takeaway is that just because everything is terrible it doesn't mean things won't get much worse

I wonder if I could get a space contract? I can't build rockets but I can blow stuff up.

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

I wonder how much electricity is used in converting data from web pages and PDFs back into database records that resemble the database records from which they were created?

Teach a robot to fish and soon you won't remember how to.

LLMs seem good at translating between equivalent SQL (eg turning correlated subquery into join) but not good at translating between SQL dialects (eg Postgres to Spark)

Language, Meaning, and Functional Programming with Matt Teichman - Picture Me Coding This week Matt Teichman, host of the Elucidations podcast, dropped by the show to chat about functional programming and its surprising relationship to linguistics and philosophy. Matt teaches Linguist...

In our latest episode we have a great discussion with Matt Teichman, a lecturer in computer science at U. Chicago, an OCaml programmer, and host of the Elucidations podcast. We cover linguistics, philosophy, functional programming, libraries, and music: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

How Compiler Explorer Works in 2025 — Matt Godbolt’s blog How we handle 92 million compilations a year without everything catching fire

It's been a while since I've written about the innards of @compiler-explorer.com. xania.org/202506/how-c... has the details, some statistics and some fun war stories.

I learned the hard way that it's also a good idea to verify that you know how to restore from a backup

o3 can now synthesize TLA+ specifications from code. Caught between the feelings of "yay more people will use formal methods" and "wait fewer people will hire me to help them use formal methods"

zfhuang99.github.io/github%20cop...

Just wanna put it out there: I am definitely NOT worth kidnapping for my Bitcoin

Somebody needs to write "What to Expect When Your Parents Turn 75".

For any North American folks having FOMO about @localfirstconf.com, there’s a new conference on sync engines as app architecture! SF in November syncconf.dev

The Ennui Exhibition Editor’s note: I wrote this post a couple days ago, and then gave a talk at the Cloud Native PDX meetup last night, and came away feeling really energized and had some great conversations.

I posted a thing. Maybe next week I'll post a thing about tech, like I've been promising for a while:

blog.appliedcomputing.io/p/the-ennui-...

UX Wing Fighters - Picture Me Coding In this episode we talk to Jonathan Whitmire who designed the Picture Me Coding swag, logos, artwork (and t-shirts and stickers and coffee mugs!).He gives us a rundown on what it's like working alongs...

This week we talk to UX expert Jonathan Whitmire about the scope and meaning of user experience and the relationship between designers and software engineers. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Diagnosing a Double-Free Concurrency Bug in Rust's Unbounded Channels Explore how Materialize engineers diagnosed and resolved a rare concurrency bug in Rust's unbounded channels that led to undefined behavior through double-free memory errors.

Very neat post up from @materialize.com engineers on finding and fixing unsoundness in Rust's mpsc channels. We had quite a few grim stack traces implicating timely, but that turned out (phew) to be Rust memory corruption rather than timely glitches.

materialize.com/blog/rust-co...

Many happy Rustaceans at the release party.

Live from the 10 Years of Rust celebration in Utrecht, Netherlands, we are very happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.87.0!

See the blog post and release notes for all the details!

blog.rust-lang.org/2025/05/15/R...