Joy Gao

Just like how human are bad at writing correct concurrent code, we are also bad at solving concurrent problems in our lives (both leads to *panic*, lol)

So the advice of only introduce concurrency if you must applies as life advice too: solve one problem at a time, multitask only if you must.

This is great and to-the-point.

add support for CTID bucketing with snapshotNumPartitionsOverride by jgao54 · Pull Request #3624 · PeerDB-io/peerdb PeerDB supports parallel snapshotting to optimize initial load time. To do this there are two ways today: we compute the total row count in a table, bucket the data evenly by watermark column -- ...

Best of OSS -- when your customer find new ways optimize your Postgres ingestion pipeline.

github.com/PeerDB-io/pe...

Hello, friends! After 10(!) years of #AdventOfCode, I've made some changes to preserve my sanity: there will be 12 days of puzzles each December (still starting Dec 1) and there is no longer a global leaderboard. Read more:
adventofcode.com/2025/about#f...
adventofcode.com/2025/about#f...

Quite optimistic about this project and the great people behind it.

LLM output much?

Really great opportunity for those who want to learn more about sync engines / building real time applications.

Encountered multiple issues on one roundtrip with BA:
- connection ticket not available for download
- failure to check-in (blank page) after filling out required personal details
- created BA account for inflight wifi, and then unable to login afterwards

Makes a lot of sense now wrt outsourcing.

:(

Now that we have all retreated from Monday’s world wide war rooms… anybody beat this chaos monkey on hard mode?

People are like programming languages, with personalities on a spectrum between strongly typed and weakly typed.

The strongly typed prefer routines, structures, and consistency; the weakly typed prefer and thrive in a dynamically changing environment.

Yes I am strongly typed 😆

An Existential Guide to: Making Friends Friends Friends What Glorious Friendly Friends!

open.substack.com/pub/theshado...

Engineering Manager - Database Integrations United States (remote)

We are hiring an EM for the database integration team (ClickPipes) at ClickHouse!

job-boards.greenhouse.io/clickhouse/j...

Great blogpost summarizing a paper that I now must read.

A secondary but equally important reason is there are few things that are table-stake — correctness, reliability, security.

One of my favourite things about working at ClickHouse (and storage systems in general) is we get to nerd out on performance optimizations constantly.

A plush purple gopher and a plush red gopher are playing Go on a wooden board. The purple gopher, on the left, has an open tin of white stones, one on its nose, with a few placed on the board. The red gopher on the right stands next to a tin full of black stones, with a few placed on the board. A large, black-and-white print of a city skyline hangs on the wall behind them. A copy of The Onion sits next to the board.

Woke up this morning to find my gophers playing Go. Huh.

Engineering is hard, but really given its deterministic nature, I always find communication a harder skill to master.

Similarly, I think it's important to voice up (respectfully) when someone's communication style does not line up with yours. Often they are not aware of it.

I find it impossible to avoid these scenarios (because the surface area is so large), but what has helped me is to be aware that this difference exists, and when misunderstanding happens, respect the others' feedback and handle it based on their preferences.

Misunderstanding can and will happen, and often it's a *cultural* difference without anyone being on the right or wrong side.

When working on an international team, one thing I learned is that interpersonal communication and team culture is navigated very differently from when the entire team comes from a similar cultural background.

Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases This short VLDB'25 paper  surveys disaggregation for cloud databases. It has several insightful points, and I found it worth summarizing.  T...

[new blog post]

Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/disa...

Oooo, you get more chaos testing, *and* for a fraction of the cost of AWS. This is the way 🥇

Netflix had it all wrong, don’t waste engineering resources to build your own chaos monkey infrastructure, just put production on AWS us-east-1 and you get chaos monkey for free.

Just kidding, just kidding…

Also didn’t realize Coq got rebranded to Rocq recently: github.com/rocq-prover/...

Hopefully with Lean, dependent type can have a comeback and gain more popularity because it’s fascinating and needs more people knowing 🥹

Underrated comment 😂

You can also do “Qian Li, PhD, DBOS” is even better :)

Short visit to Bay Area. Caltrains got a lot nicer but a lot less commuters comparing to pre-pandemic.

How we built a new powerful JSON data type for ClickHouse We’re excited to introduce our new and significantly enhanced JSON data type, purpose-built to deliver high-performance handling of JSON data. Our core engineer, Pavel Kruglov, dives into how we built...

It's so gratifying to introduce new users to ClickHouse's powerful JSON data type; and seeing their reaction when they test out its performance for the first time.

If you like a good technical reading, don't miss out on this blogpost:
clickhouse.com/blog/a-new-p...