Blog Columns
Six thematic columns, each with its own dedicated RSS feed.
Database Guru
75posts
Database news, industry surveys, architecture, and best practices.
Cloud-Exiter
66posts
Cloud economics, repatriation, and building sovereign infrastructure.
Postgres Mage
126posts
PostgreSQL ecosystem, internals, extensions, and production tuning.
AI Agent Explorer
97posts
Practical engineering with coding agents, LLMs, AI4DB, and DB4AI.
Travel Notes
12posts
Trips, hikes, landscapes, and field notes across mountains and seas.
Miscellaneous
40posts
Essays, reflections, and personal writing inside and outside of tech.
Shockwaves at Alibaba Qwen: The Soul of the Team Walks Away
Qwen lead Justin Lin publicly announced his departure, followed by more core-team exits and a wave of speculation about compute allocation, KPI pressure, and organizational power shifts inside …
Drones Took Out Three AWS AZ: Into the Era of Bombable Data Centers
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones reportedly hit AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. If the reporting is accurate, this may be the first public case of a hyperscale cloud provider suffering direct …
Claude's Global Outage: Missiles or a Success Tax?
Claude went down globally on March 2, 2026. The cinematic theory blamed drone strikes on AWS in the Middle East, but the failure pattern points much more strongly to a front-end and authentication …
Waking Up at #1 on Hacker News Again
I woke up to check the war news and found X notifications saying my post on reviving MinIO had hit #1 on Hacker News—submitted by someone else after my own submission died at 2 points.
Trump Orders Government-Wide Ban on Anthropic
On February 27, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a directive on Truth Social ordering every federal agency to immediately stop using AI lab Anthropic's technology.
Pigsty v4.2: 12 Kernels in Bloom
Pigsty v4.2 turns one stack into 12 enterprise-grade PostgreSQL flavors: multi-master pgEdge, graph-native AgensGraph, MPP Cloudberry, rebuilt compatibility kernels, 461 extensions, infrastructure …
AI Was the Excuse for 4,000 Layoffs. Software Engineer Hiring Rose 11%
AI is becoming the story companies tell when they lay people off, but total demand for software engineering has not disappeared. It is spreading across the wider economy, driven by second-order demand …
PostgreSQL Out-of-Cycle Emergency Minor Releases Are Out
As noted in last week's advisory on the February minor-release regressions, it was worth holding off on upgrades until the out-of-cycle fixes shipped. Those emergency releases (PostgreSQL 18.3, 17.9, …
How Much Can One Person Get Done with AI over Spring Festival?
Over roughly ten days during Spring Festival, I used Claude Code, Codex, and a pile of workflows to translate books, ship releases, package software, refresh websites, and keep publishing daily. This …
Reviving MinIO in Two Hours — And Then My Website Blew Up
A routine morning check of GitHub turned up a comment from a Google Distinguished Engineer on my MinIO fork—along with a sudden wave of stars and traffic.
Is Oracle-Compatible Postgres Actually Useful?
A migration case with only a JAR and no source code shows why Oracle syntax compatibility is not always a fake requirement, and how IvorySQL + Pigsty can absorb legacy debt at low cost.
Palantir's Ontology Narrative
Ontology is largely a data-modeling method. In enterprise practice, much of it overlaps with familiar database concepts, while the framing can make it feel newer and more differentiated than it really …
Urgent Advisory: Pause PostgreSQL Minor-Release Installs and Upgrades
The PostgreSQL 18.2 minor-release train introduced regressions in substring() and WAL replay. Hold off on fresh deployments and upgrades, then update promptly after the out-of-cycle releases ship on …
AI Through McLuhan's Lens: When Media Stop Extending the Body and Start Extending the Mind
McLuhan's "the medium is the message," extension and amputation, hot and cool media, rear-view mirror effect, and four laws of media offer a way to dissect AI and its deeper effects on our cognitive …
A New Year—and What AI Will Change
AI is reshaping knowledge work far faster than historical experience would suggest. The real challenge is not whether you know how to use AI, but whether you can retool your thinking and skills before …
I Finished Translating the Second Edition of DDIA: An Eight-Year Parable About AI
Codex translated DDIA's second edition in a single morning. Eight years ago, I spent three months translating the first edition by hand. The contrast reveals just how far AI has come.
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO's repo is officially archived and abandoned. And how AI Agents helped bring it back from the dead. This post explains how a community fork restores the admin console and ships binaries via CI/CD …
Pigsty v4.1: Speed Is the Moat
Same-day production support for PG 18.2 is the core message of Pigsty v4.1. In this cycle, very few vendors shipped day-zero readiness: AWS RDS, EDB, and Pigsty were among them.
When Coding Becomes Cheap, What Still Matters?
Codex 5.3 xHigh pushed my workflow past a tipping point: writing code is no longer the scarce resource. The real leverage is design quality and engineering acceptance. This is the practical loop I use …
The Agent Moat: Runtime
A mediocre local who knows the terrain beats a genius parachuted into unknown territory. Intelligence without context is idle. An agent without a runtime is vapor.
AI Ripped the Skin Off Software
Software stocks are melting down. Who survives? Who rises? AI stripped away software's skin, exposing the database skeleton underneath. The market isn't panic-selling — it's repricing.
First Chinese PostgreSQL Vendor on the PGConf.dev Main Stage
Three years, three CFP submissions, and finally a full session talk at PGConf.dev 2026—likely the first time a homegrown Chinese PostgreSQL vendor (a one-man database shop) takes the main stage to …
New Programmers in the AI Era: Where Do You Go?
Should we still hire fresh grads? Squeezed between AI and senior devs, what's the play for new programmers? Master the right tools, take initiative, find the right mentor.
The Great Software Meltdown: When Translation Layers Get Squashed
SaaS and workflow software are dead. From APPs & GUIs to Agents, Databases, and CLI.
Shockwaves at Alibaba Qwen: The Soul of the Team Walks Away
Qwen lead Justin Lin publicly announced his departure, followed by more core-team exits and a wave of speculation about compute allocation, KPI pressure, and organizational power shifts inside …
Drones Took Out Three AWS AZ: Into the Era of Bombable Data Centers
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones reportedly hit AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. If the reporting is accurate, this may be the first public case of a hyperscale cloud provider suffering direct …
Claude's Global Outage: Missiles or a Success Tax?
Claude went down globally on March 2, 2026. The cinematic theory blamed drone strikes on AWS in the Middle East, but the failure pattern points much more strongly to a front-end and authentication …
Waking Up at #1 on Hacker News Again
I woke up to check the war news and found X notifications saying my post on reviving MinIO had hit #1 on Hacker News—submitted by someone else after my own submission died at 2 points.
Trump Orders Government-Wide Ban on Anthropic
On February 27, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a directive on Truth Social ordering every federal agency to immediately stop using AI lab Anthropic's technology.
Pigsty v4.2: 12 Kernels in Bloom
Pigsty v4.2 turns one stack into 12 enterprise-grade PostgreSQL flavors: multi-master pgEdge, graph-native AgensGraph, MPP Cloudberry, rebuilt compatibility kernels, 461 extensions, infrastructure …
AI Was the Excuse for 4,000 Layoffs. Software Engineer Hiring Rose 11%
AI is becoming the story companies tell when they lay people off, but total demand for software engineering has not disappeared. It is spreading across the wider economy, driven by second-order demand …
PostgreSQL Out-of-Cycle Emergency Minor Releases Are Out
As noted in last week's advisory on the February minor-release regressions, it was worth holding off on upgrades until the out-of-cycle fixes shipped. Those emergency releases (PostgreSQL 18.3, 17.9, …
How Much Can One Person Get Done with AI over Spring Festival?
Over roughly ten days during Spring Festival, I used Claude Code, Codex, and a pile of workflows to translate books, ship releases, package software, refresh websites, and keep publishing daily. This …
Reviving MinIO in Two Hours — And Then My Website Blew Up
A routine morning check of GitHub turned up a comment from a Google Distinguished Engineer on my MinIO fork—along with a sudden wave of stars and traffic.
Is Oracle-Compatible Postgres Actually Useful?
A migration case with only a JAR and no source code shows why Oracle syntax compatibility is not always a fake requirement, and how IvorySQL + Pigsty can absorb legacy debt at low cost.
Palantir's Ontology Narrative
Ontology is largely a data-modeling method. In enterprise practice, much of it overlaps with familiar database concepts, while the framing can make it feel newer and more differentiated than it really …
Urgent Advisory: Pause PostgreSQL Minor-Release Installs and Upgrades
The PostgreSQL 18.2 minor-release train introduced regressions in substring() and WAL replay. Hold off on fresh deployments and upgrades, then update promptly after the out-of-cycle releases ship on …
AI Through McLuhan's Lens: When Media Stop Extending the Body and Start Extending the Mind
McLuhan's "the medium is the message," extension and amputation, hot and cool media, rear-view mirror effect, and four laws of media offer a way to dissect AI and its deeper effects on our cognitive …
A New Year—and What AI Will Change
AI is reshaping knowledge work far faster than historical experience would suggest. The real challenge is not whether you know how to use AI, but whether you can retool your thinking and skills before …
I Finished Translating the Second Edition of DDIA: An Eight-Year Parable About AI
Codex translated DDIA's second edition in a single morning. Eight years ago, I spent three months translating the first edition by hand. The contrast reveals just how far AI has come.
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO's repo is officially archived and abandoned. And how AI Agents helped bring it back from the dead. This post explains how a community fork restores the admin console and ships binaries via CI/CD …
Pigsty v4.1: Speed Is the Moat
Same-day production support for PG 18.2 is the core message of Pigsty v4.1. In this cycle, very few vendors shipped day-zero readiness: AWS RDS, EDB, and Pigsty were among them.
When Coding Becomes Cheap, What Still Matters?
Codex 5.3 xHigh pushed my workflow past a tipping point: writing code is no longer the scarce resource. The real leverage is design quality and engineering acceptance. This is the practical loop I use …
The Agent Moat: Runtime
A mediocre local who knows the terrain beats a genius parachuted into unknown territory. Intelligence without context is idle. An agent without a runtime is vapor.
AI Ripped the Skin Off Software
Software stocks are melting down. Who survives? Who rises? AI stripped away software's skin, exposing the database skeleton underneath. The market isn't panic-selling — it's repricing.
First Chinese PostgreSQL Vendor on the PGConf.dev Main Stage
Three years, three CFP submissions, and finally a full session talk at PGConf.dev 2026—likely the first time a homegrown Chinese PostgreSQL vendor (a one-man database shop) takes the main stage to …
New Programmers in the AI Era: Where Do You Go?
Should we still hire fresh grads? Squeezed between AI and senior devs, what's the play for new programmers? Master the right tools, take initiative, find the right mentor.
The Great Software Meltdown: When Translation Layers Get Squashed
SaaS and workflow software are dead. From APPs & GUIs to Agents, Databases, and CLI.
Shockwaves at Alibaba Qwen: The Soul of the Team Walks Away
I had become more optimistic about Alibaba over the last year, largely because the Qwen team seemed to be doing real work: shipping strong models, contributing to open source, and earning genuine international attention. That is why this personnel …
I had become more optimistic about Alibaba over the last year, largely because the Qwen team seemed to be doing real work: shipping strong models, contributing to open source, and earning genuine international attention. That is why this personnel …
Drones Took Out Three AWS AZ: Into the Era of Bombable Data Centers
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones reportedly hit AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. If the public reporting is accurate, this may be the first time a hyperscale cloud provider has suffered direct military damage to physical data-center …
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones reportedly hit AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. If the public reporting is accurate, this may be the first time a hyperscale cloud provider has suffered direct military damage to physical data-center …
Claude's Global Outage: Missiles or a Success Tax?
Claude went down globally on March 2, 2026. The dramatic narrative that immediately formed was irresistible: AWS facilities in the Middle East had just been hit by drones, and now Claude was collapsing too. The story spread fast. But it was probably …
Claude went down globally on March 2, 2026. The dramatic narrative that immediately formed was irresistible: AWS facilities in the Middle East had just been hit by drones, and now Claude was collapsing too. The story spread fast. But it was probably …
Waking Up at #1 on Hacker News Again
I woke up this morning to check how the war was going, only to find notifications on X telling me I had hit #1 on Hacker News. Sure enough, it was the post I wrote a few days ago about reviving MinIO. It was my article, though I was not the one who …
I woke up this morning to check how the war was going, only to find notifications on X telling me I had hit #1 on Hacker News. Sure enough, it was the post I wrote a few days ago about reviving MinIO. It was my article, though I was not the one who …
Trump Orders Government-Wide Ban on Anthropic
On February 27, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a directive on Truth Social ordering every federal agency to immediately cease all use of AI company Anthropic’s technology. That same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on X that …
On February 27, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a directive on Truth Social ordering every federal agency to immediately cease all use of AI company Anthropic’s technology. That same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on X that …
Pigsty v4.2: 12 Kernels in Bloom
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v4.2 is officially released, hot on the heels of PostgreSQL’s emergency out-of-band minor updates. This release ships three brand-new PG kernels — the graph database AgensGraph, the multi-master distributed …
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v4.2 is officially released, hot on the heels of PostgreSQL’s emergency out-of-band minor updates. This release ships three brand-new PG kernels — the graph database AgensGraph, the multi-master distributed …
AI Was the Excuse for 4,000 Layoffs. Software Engineer Hiring Rose 11%
Yesterday brought a bombshell. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 40% of its staff in one stroke. More than 4,000 people are leaving, shrinking the workforce from over 10,000 to fewer than 6,000. The explanation, of course, was AI. Dorsey went …
Yesterday brought a bombshell. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 40% of its staff in one stroke. More than 4,000 people are leaving, shrinking the workforce from over 10,000 to fewer than 6,000. The explanation, of course, was AI. Dorsey went …
PostgreSQL Out-of-Cycle Emergency Minor Releases Are Out
As I noted earlier in Urgent Advisory: Pause PostgreSQL Minor-Release Installs and Upgrades, the previous batch of PostgreSQL minor releases shipped with regressions, making it wiser to hold off on deployments until the out-of-cycle fixes arrived. …
As I noted earlier in Urgent Advisory: Pause PostgreSQL Minor-Release Installs and Upgrades, the previous batch of PostgreSQL minor releases shipped with regressions, making it wiser to hold off on deployments until the out-of-cycle fixes arrived. …
How Much Can One Person Get Done with AI over Spring Festival?
Once the public holiday ended and work officially resumed, I realized I had effectively been working through most of Spring Festival anyway. From February 13 to February 23, I translated two O’Reilly books, wrote ten WeChat posts, forked MinIO, …
Once the public holiday ended and work officially resumed, I realized I had effectively been working through most of Spring Festival anyway. From February 13 to February 23, I translated two O’Reilly books, wrote ten WeChat posts, forked MinIO, …
Reviving MinIO in Two Hours — And Then My Website Blew Up
I opened GitHub this morning as usual and saw a new comment under my earlier blog post about MinIO: “I love what you did. You’re right about the Claude Code improvements to productivity. Thank you for maintaining a stable version of Minio.” That made …
I opened GitHub this morning as usual and saw a new comment under my earlier blog post about MinIO: “I love what you did. You’re right about the Claude Code improvements to productivity. Thank you for maintaining a stable version of Minio.” That made …
Is Oracle-Compatible Postgres Actually Useful?
I used to roll my eyes at “Oracle compatibility” in PostgreSQL forks. My take was simple: if your SQL doesn’t run on vanilla Postgres, fix your app rather than database. Then a migration task slightly changed my mind. The Problem: A JAR and Nothing …
I used to roll my eyes at “Oracle compatibility” in PostgreSQL forks. My take was simple: if your SQL doesn’t run on vanilla Postgres, fix your app rather than database. Then a migration task slightly changed my mind. The Problem: A JAR and Nothing …
Palantir's Ontology Narrative
I. Two Kinds of Faces By late 2025, Palantir’s market cap had blown past $400 billion — a 20x run in just two years. Every roadshow, every whitepaper, every tech blog from this company hammers the same word: Ontology. The word has been packaged as …
I. Two Kinds of Faces By late 2025, Palantir’s market cap had blown past $400 billion — a 20x run in just two years. Every roadshow, every whitepaper, every tech blog from this company hammers the same word: Ontology. The word has been packaged as …
Urgent Advisory: Pause PostgreSQL Minor-Release Installs and Upgrades
The 18.2 minor-release train introduced two bugs. Hold off on fresh deployments and upgrades, then update promptly after 18.3 ships next week. One week ago, the PostgreSQL community shipped its routine February minor releases, and Pigsty v4.1 …
The 18.2 minor-release train introduced two bugs. Hold off on fresh deployments and upgrades, then update promptly after 18.3 ships next week. One week ago, the PostgreSQL community shipped its routine February minor releases, and Pigsty v4.1 …
AI Through McLuhan's Lens: When Media Stop Extending the Body and Start Extending the Mind
Notion founder Ivan Zhao recently wrote a widely circulated essay, Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds, using the Industrial Revolution as a metaphor for AI: AI gives us “infinite minds” and will fundamentally reshape the structure of knowledge work. …
Notion founder Ivan Zhao recently wrote a widely circulated essay, Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds, using the Industrial Revolution as a metaphor for AI: AI gives us “infinite minds” and will fundamentally reshape the structure of knowledge work. …
A New Year—and What AI Will Change
Original WeChat post For this generation of knowledge workers, the greatest danger is not that they “don’t know how to use AI.” It is that they still think they have a 20-year adjustment window. They don’t. We may be the first generation of …
Original WeChat post For this generation of knowledge workers, the greatest danger is not that they “don’t know how to use AI.” It is that they still think they have a 20-year adjustment window. They don’t. We may be the first generation of …
I Finished Translating the Second Edition of DDIA: An Eight-Year Parable About AI
This morning, I ran ten Codex sessions in parallel and, in less than half a day, translated the final four newly released chapters of DDIA’s second edition. The results surprised me. Formatting, terminology, footnotes, and anchors were nearly perfect …
This morning, I ran ten Codex sessions in parallel and, in less than half a day, translated the final four newly released chapters of DDIA’s second edition. The results surprised me. Formatting, terminology, footnotes, and anchors were nearly perfect …
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO’s open-source repo has been officially archived. No more maintenance. End of an era — but open source doesn’t die that easily. I created a MinIO fork, restored the admin console, rebuilt the binary distribution pipeline, and brought it back to …
MinIO’s open-source repo has been officially archived. No more maintenance. End of an era — but open source doesn’t die that easily. I created a MinIO fork, restored the admin console, rebuilt the binary distribution pipeline, and brought it back to …
Pigsty v4.1: Speed Is the Moat
GitHub Release | Release Note If there is one takeaway from this release, it is that speed matters. On February 12, 2026, the PostgreSQL community released 18.2 / 17.8 / 16.12 / 15.16 / 14.21 on the regular minor cadence. As far as I could tell, the …
GitHub Release | Release Note If there is one takeaway from this release, it is that speed matters. On February 12, 2026, the PostgreSQL community released 18.2 / 17.8 / 16.12 / 15.16 / 14.21 on the regular minor cadence. As far as I could tell, the …
When Coding Becomes Cheap, What Still Matters?
I did not publish much last week because I was busy stress-testing OpenAI Codex 3 xHigh. With temporary double quota, I burned almost the full $200 budget running parallel sessions across more than ten Pigsty subprojects: core repo, CN/EN docs, blog, …
I did not publish much last week because I was busy stress-testing OpenAI Codex 3 xHigh. With temporary double quota, I burned almost the full $200 budget running parallel sessions across more than ten Pigsty subprojects: core repo, CN/EN docs, blog, …
The Agent Moat: Runtime
3 AM. Database alerts are blowing up. You throw the alert info at a “top-tier” DBA Agent. It’s well-read — knows the PostgreSQL docs inside out, writes beautiful diagnostic SQL, can recite every kernel parameter from memory. It freezes: What’s the …
3 AM. Database alerts are blowing up. You throw the alert info at a “top-tier” DBA Agent. It’s well-read — knows the PostgreSQL docs inside out, writes beautiful diagnostic SQL, can recite every kernel parameter from memory. It freezes: What’s the …
AI Ripped the Skin Off Software
AI stripped away software’s skin, exposing the database skeleton underneath. The market isn’t panic-selling — it’s repricing. I. The Bloodbath Software stocks are experiencing a historic meltdown. In January 2026, the iShares Software ETF (IGV) …
AI stripped away software’s skin, exposing the database skeleton underneath. The market isn’t panic-selling — it’s repricing. I. The Bloodbath Software stocks are experiencing a historic meltdown. In January 2026, the iShares Software ETF (IGV) …
First Chinese PostgreSQL Vendor on the PGConf.dev Main Stage
This morning I got the email: my talk proposal, “Extensions for Everyone”, has been officially accepted for a full session at PGConf.dev 2026. That means a lot to me personally. Having my work in the PostgreSQL ecosystem recognized by the core …
This morning I got the email: my talk proposal, “Extensions for Everyone”, has been officially accepted for a full session at PGConf.dev 2026. That means a lot to me personally. Having my work in the PostgreSQL ecosystem recognized by the core …
New Programmers in the AI Era: Where Do You Go?
The Window Is Closing Recently I was chatting with a few friends in tech, and we landed on a question that silenced everyone: “Should we still hire fresh grads?” Nobody could answer. Not because they didn’t want to — because they didn’t dare. AI …
The Window Is Closing Recently I was chatting with a few friends in tech, and we landed on a question that silenced everyone: “Should we still hire fresh grads?” Nobody could answer. Not because they didn’t want to — because they didn’t dare. AI …
The Great Software Meltdown: When Translation Layers Get Squashed
I. The Great Software Meltdown The software world is witnessing an epic valuation collapse. This isn’t about individual companies tanking. This is a systemic implosion of the entire SaaS sector. Wall Street is voting with real money: these software …
I. The Great Software Meltdown The software world is witnessing an epic valuation collapse. This isn’t about individual companies tanking. This is a systemic implosion of the entire SaaS sector. Wall Street is voting with real money: these software …