I see you out there, thinking that by limiting yourself to just EC2 and S3 you’re avoiding vendor lock-in. You imagine the day you tell AWS to jump in a lake and migrate painlessly to GCP. I’ve got news for you. Everything is lock-in. EC2 i…
I am slow to adopt new high-level abstractions, take on dependencies, and generally trade depth of understanding for speed of delivery. I like doing things hard way. Not all the time, of course — at work, time to market matters — but someti…
Exactly one week after I began working at PlanetScale, I pitched the CEO on what he’d soon name PlanetScale Metal. The pitch was simple: What if we ran Vitess the way I ran it at Slack, with fast, local SSD storage, instead of the slow way,…
Substrate was inspired by an ambitious AWS network architectural migration the Melbourne-based Cloud Engineering team at Slack took on circa 2018, which they inexplicably called Project White Castle. The high points of that project were lot…
Going out of business (an overly dramatic way to say it — sorrynotsorry) is a lot of work. On top of the careful work we did to prop open doors for customers who wanted to migrate to still-irrigated pastures and relicensing as open-source s…
I bought a bag of Raspberry Pi boards when the Raspberry Pi 5 came out and I’m itching to do something with them. In lieu of knowing what something is, let’s PXEboot them. I’ve got a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board for my PXEboot server, three
tl;dr Travis and I both got jobs at PlanetScale, building a rad cloud MySQL product. Travis and I tried all sorts of things both marketing and product to try to breathe life into the stagnant business that was Substrate in the post-consulti…
Substrate is now open-source under the three-clause BSD license, a change we made as the metaphorical lights were going out on Source & Binary, the company I founded in 2020 that developed and attempted to build a business around Substrate.…
In my previous article, I shared that Source & Binary has ceased operations. There’s much more to say about how we got here but I want to take this article to lay out where Substrate is going: Substrate is now open source under the three-cl…
Sad news: Well, not news. Sad slightly dated information: Source & Binary has ceased operations. Substrate 2024.08 was the last official release of that software under Source & Binary’s stewardship. Travis and I have jobs. (More on these la…
Like a great many Twitter-addicted computer professionals, I’ve been giving Mastodon a much more serious look this week than I have in years past. I can’t quite put my finger on why. Anyway. Inspired in somewhat equal parts by the lesson we…
This is a parable about adopting and outgrowing software frameworks, starring Ruby on Rails and Django. I have recited this dozens of times over the years but never took the time to write it down. I’m writing it down in its original form, t…