Interested in how we test systems at Amazon?

In a new article in Communications of the ACM, Ankush and I write about the evolution of systems correctness and testing practices at AWS. We cover classic and formal approaches, and new ones like deterministic simulation.

cacm.acm.org/practice/sys...

Current London 2025 Keynote

Current London 2025: Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, AI... and some drama.

www.streamingdata.tech/p/current-lo...

also spotify

How We Approached Google Drive Backups in Our Workspace Organization Have you ever considered the risk of being locked out of your data? To mitigate this risk, we implemented domainwide Google Drive backups.

As reliable as Google Drive is, when viewed as an external system, it's a single point of failure. That's why we backup all data that's stored there - Jakub shares our approach, accompanied by an OSS project!

softwaremill.com/how-we-appro...

also, do you have know of any benchmarks/articles comparing of the performance of partitioned vs non-partitioned tables?

That's a really great feature from Postgres. I've so many questions: If you do a select from a table do you need to specify the partition or can you just reference the table? What happens if you want to query multiple partitions - does postgres handle this automatically?

Replace "github" with "gitingest" in the url, and you get the whole repo as a single string that you can then paste in your LLMs

Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges) Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. A deep dive into novel design decisions, moving off AWS, and more.

Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network - in @pragmaticengineer.com's Real-World Engineering Challenges series
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bluesky

What's the advantage of Guava's monitor/guard have over the standard java libraries primitives? Guava have some nice collections and functions over these collections, but when it comes to concurrency I usually stick with the java SDL primites.

Some images from the Twitter years in a thread (since they are no longer accessible) 1/n