If you’ve been in this trade for a while, you have probably seen dozens of debates on the merits and problems of SQL as a relational database query language. As an ORM maintainer, I have a few gripes with SQL, but overall it is workable, and anyway, it has so much inertia that there’s no point fantasizing about a replacement.

"The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade." - Benjamin Franklin

Julien Malka homepage

Last week, X exploded when a “vibe coder” announced his SaaS was under attack. His business, built entirely with AI assistance and “zero hand-written code,” was experiencing bypassed subscriptions, maxed-out API keys, and database corruption. His follow-up admission made this notable: “as you know, I’m not technical so this is taking me longer than usual to figure out.” As someone deeply immersed in the AI code generation space, I’ve been watching this unfold with a mix of sympathy and frustration. Let me be clear — I’m not against AI-assisted development. My own tool aims to improve code generation quality. But there’s a growing and dangerous fantasy that technical knowledge is optional in the new AI-powered world. After observing many similar (though less public) security disasters, I’ve come to a controversial conclusion: vibe coding isn’t just inefficient — it’s potentially catastrophic.

Write faster code by understanding how it flows through your CPU

My lessons learned, dos and donts from breaking down monoliths. I gathered my experience on what to do before even starting. I explained hy defining real business metrics is critical and why you should assume that many Monoliths parts will stay. Of course I mentioned the Strangler Fig pattern, but went further than that!

Even the best policies fail if they aren’t adopted by the teams they’re intended to serve. Can we persistently change our company’s behaviors with a one-time announcement? No, probably not. I refer to the art of making policies work as “operations” or “strategy operations.” The good news is that effectively operating a policy is two-thirds avoiding common practices that simply don’t work. The other one-third takes some practice, but can be practiced in any engineering role: there’s no need to wait until you’re an executive to start building mastery.

Posted on Wednesday 19 Mar 2025. 519 words, 7 links. By Matt Webb.

They work in the beta version.

It turns out that the history of the snap fastener is actually surprisingly relevant to the political moment that we’re currently in.

The Things You Don't Know Will Definitely Hurt You

Three months ago I published my annual predictions, and while I rarely revisit them in the middle of the year, I do want to note an interesting development related to prediction #3, which states: &…

Hello, friends! I’ve been thinking back on my career recently, which I’ve had plenty of time to do, considering that I am exploring creative outlets like blogging, and that I’m cu…

Next month will mark the one year anniversary of when I emerged back into the real world, staggering into the light from an 18 year stay in the developer mines at Google.

I'm done talking about microservices: the term is confusing, discussions are abstract, and without organisational change, microservices are pointless

I gave a talk at the Berkeley I-school's Information Access Seminar entitled Archival Storage . Below the fold is the text of the talk with...

It feels quite uncomfortable that cloudflare is somewhat openly admitting to analysing login credentials that are going through the reverse proxy, and providing...

Why I think Slack and Slack-clones are actually a net negative for most organizations that use them.

This letter was led and organized by Fight for the Future, which is organizing actions against invasive ID checks through stoponlineIDchecks.org. A broad coalition of organizations dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights, abortion access, rights for youth, privacy, and freedom of speech have issued a letter to US lawmakers warning that online ID check bills, which would […]

The untold story of betrayal, billion-dollar bets, and AI models that negotiate their own prices while Silicon Valley burns

Am I panning for gold or working at the sewage treatment plant?

In this episode of the IPv6 Buzz, we dive into two RFCs for discovering IPv6 prefixes: RFC7050 and RFC8781. Why these two? First, 8781 is being proposed as preferential to 7050. Second, I happen to be a co-author on the draft that proposes the preference for 8781 and as usual, I have “insights” to share. We start with some background on RFC 7050, including the limitations that led to the development of RFC 8781.

Looking back at Gamergate, a flash point in internet history, and what it has to tell us about our current moment.

HTTP/3 has been in development since at least 2016, while QUIC (the protocol beneath it) was first introduced by Google way back in 2013. Both are now...

The other day I was slicing a big loaf of dark Italian bread from a bakery; it is a pleasure to carve thick hunks of hearty bread to ready for the toaster. While I was happily slicing the loaf, the … Continue reading →

My popular single-serving site that works around Google’s AI snippets could, unfortunately, see an infusion of AI soon. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Discover how Warp terminal's AI-powered debugging feature can automatically detect, fix, and explain coding errors in your scripts.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his law…

The proliferation of affordable lithium batteries has made modern life convenient in a way we could only imagine in the 80s when everything was powered by squadrons of AAs, or has it? [Ian Bogost] …

I have been on the phone a lot today—talking to Katie Fehrenbacher, Stacey Higginbotham, and Chris Albrecht. Surj Patel popped into town, and we had coffee. Call it kismet—…