iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 05/08/2026

I was excited that GitHub stacked PRs were finally available. Stuck "merging" for 24 hours. It was naive of me to expect GitHub to work properly.

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 11/11/2025

Happy 14th birthday to my best lil boy ♥️

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 26/05/2025

Angie has been discharged from the hospital 🥰🥰 He didn't enjoy his time in recovery, too scared to eat so we'd visit and hand feed him each day, but now he's home devouring food and snoring like a train ♥️

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 20/05/2025

We got to visit Angie in recovery today; he's still in his oxygen crate, but he's awake and alert. Wagged his tail and scratched his beans to demand we release him. He's off all heart meds ♥️🥰

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 18/05/2025

Pre-op bloods done, he's getting in some last minute window time

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 18/05/2025

We made it all the way to Tokyo, and it's now 2 hours until this boy has heart surgery ♥️

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 15/04/2025

We did a little spring photoshoot at the weekend

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 25/12/2024

Corporate wants you to find the puppy in this picture

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 10/12/2024

I had nice Bluebird CLI news to share and then I realised I broke builds and its a little embarrassing that it took 16 commits, including rewriting the entire CLI to fix it...but I fixed it

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 30/11/2024

I left Bluebird running on an EC2 last week, sending all BlueSky network events to Tinybird. Since 27th that's 232 million events (~50GB ClickHouse binary compressed). Fun to see the daily traffic pattern of BlueSky:

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 30/11/2024

My next Model Context Protocol experiment: www.claudekeep.com Just ask Claude to "save this chat" and it'll push your chat your ClaudeKeep. From there, you can access all of your private saved chats, or publish a chat if you want to share it. Read the README: github.com/sdairs/claud...

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 28/11/2024

Did you know a dog CT scan costs an absolute fortune? His head is only 2 inches but that doesn't change the price apparently 😅

An amazing dog in their home made dog blanket

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 27/11/2024

I've been working on Bluebird github.com/sdairs/blueb... to send the BlueSky firehose to @tinybirdco.bsky.social. Yesterday @anthropic.com released MCP so here's the Tinybird MCP Server v0 github.com/tinybirdco/t... which means now I can use Claude to connect to Tinybird and chat with that data 🤯

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 25/11/2024

searching Elastic docs: They have an Algolia-style search product called ESRE?? 4/5 results are for a 6-year deprecated release, but the URL says 'current', and all rank above the only non-deprecated page Seems like a missing recency/temporal ranking element in the search?

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 09/11/2024

I have a lot of data people in my feed now but not enough dogs. Send dogs.

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 07/11/2024

I'm seeing a common trend: applications that have a transactional core eventually up want to serve analytics to users. How do you do that while continuing to serve OLTP from DynamoDB? tbrd.co/ddb-arch-ab #databs

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 07/11/2024

However, while this makes DynamoDB great for most transactional workloads, its incapable of doing analytics (the DynamoDB API doesn't even support aggregations). And that's totally fine. That's not its job. You don't expect a heart surgeon to moonlight writing blackhole simulations.

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 07/11/2024

The partition key allows DynamoDB to physically separate related data into partitions, while the sorting key orders data within the partition. As partitions grow, the sorting key can be used as a boundary to split partitions up into smaller chunks.

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 07/11/2024

DynamoDB was designed to be excellent at one job, and not OK-ish at many. That makes it one of the best choices for CRUDL workloads that have predictable access patterns and don't rely heavily on relations. Within those constraints, its one of the most predictably fast & scalable databases around.

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 07/11/2024

We're having our own drama in the UK...

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 31/10/2024

Happy Halloween from this childless cat lady 🤘

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 29/05/2023

Beautiful time in Lanzarote with the Tinybird team ❤️ My social batteries are at 0%, I will now recede into my cave to recharge ✌️

The 60 birdies from Tinybird in Lanzarote

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 19/05/2023

Great time at Kafka London with the 🐤 crew ❤️

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 13/05/2023

Adiós Malaga 👋 JOTB was fun, now to do it all again - anyone at Kafka London next week?

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 10/05/2023

While I was presenting today, this boi was having an operation on his leg and I was super worried about him - but he's out & awake now, still a lil high from the good drugs 🤗 All worries are over, now to enjoy Malaga and the rest of J on the Beach ❤️

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 09/05/2023

Beautiful flight to Malaga today 🌞 Plane got hit by lightning twice leaving London, which was a tad spooky, but otherwise a smooth ride Excited to be hosting a workshop at J on the Beach tomorrow!

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 07/05/2023

He got more style than me

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Al Brown 🐢 @alasdairb.com · 02/05/2023

So happy with the turnout for our Edinburgh meetup! About 60 folks eatin pizza and nerdin about data 🤗 Now I need to reset my extroversion meter to do it all again in Malaga next week 🌞❤️