I have been writing a series of essays on adapting software engineering to the widespread use of AI. My last essay focused on adapting organizations, designing them to be their most effective with AI. Because leadership is so critically imp…
Of anything I’ve worked on in my career, performance work has been the most rewarding. I enjoy making systems more efficient, especially when it opens up brand new possibilities for customers. I also find developing an empirical understandi…
I have been writing a series of essays on how the software industry is adapting to AI. My first essay reflected on AI and productivity and I tried to capture some of the uncertain feelings of this liminal time. The second essay focused on c…
I have written a series of essays on how the software industry is adapting to AI. The first essay reflected on productivity, the second essay was about code review, and the third essay looked at AI through the lens of software engineering.
Dave Farley’s book Modern Software Engineering explores the question: Is software engineering real engineering? Farley’s conclusion is yes, when the work is performed by applying a set of broadly accepted and repeatable practices that scale…
In an earlier essay, I shared my reflections on the rapid transformation of software engineering by AI. In this essay, I will explore specific challenges related to code review. Code review has been a core part of software engineering for d…
I had the honor of both attending and speaking at the last two International Workshops on High Performance Transaction Systems, fondly known as HPTS. This is a special event where experts in systems research, development, and operations are…
2025 was the most productive year of my career. I worked on the three largest projects I have ever worked on: migrating all services to a new cloud platform, developing a new edge computing platform, and building a distributed database. Com…
Elon Musk described his design process during an interview while touring SpaceX: 1) make your requirements less dumb, 2) delete the part or the process, 3) simplify or optimize, 4) accelerate cycle time, 5) automate. He emphasized if you ar…
This article is a companion to my talk Rust Is Not as Safe as You Think It Is: Improving Safety and Reliability in Rust. Rust is an increasingly popular systems programming language, partly due to the memory-safety guarantees enforced both
DuckDB is an analytical database system that can be embedded in-process. It is fast, efficient, and easy to use. It has a number of extensions, including ones for querying popular file formats, like CSV, JSON, or Parquet; querying other dat…
In my last article, I explored tools that can help ensure unsafe code in Rust is free from security vulnerabilities caused by undefined behaviours. These tools included sanitizers for memory and concurrency errors, and Miri, an interpreter