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Ben Schofield

@benjscho.bsky.social
92 followers 115 following 59 posts

Software dev at AWS, working on DSQL Learning more about distributed systems, formal methods, living well. Trying to write software that doesn’t get me paged

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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
So is taking a newborn to see the odyssey in IMAX recommended or not? I need a stars & strollers Nolan edition in Seattle
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Eulogy isn’t an original idea, there are other user space libs out there, but I think it can contribute a different set of ergonomics. We use something similar at DSQL for sandbox clean up and it’s been working very well for us.
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
I’m on Pat leave until August, so in between nappies and naps I’m going to keep myself entertained with some OSS! For a start, I published a first version of eulogy, a user space library for async drop: crates.io/crates/eulogy
crates.io
crates.io: Rust Package Registry
crates.io serves as a central registry for sharing crates, which are packages or libraries written in Rust that you can use to enhance your projects
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
This is so real, I got a cheap thinkpad recently and since windows is so user hostile now, I went for Linux. It’s insanely nice to say “figure out why my monitors not connecting” or “connect to my Bluetooth speaker” and have the right commands conjured up without 15 minutes of googling
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Vale @vale.rocks · 19/06/2026
There are only two file formats: disguised zips and renamed text files. JSON? Text. EPUB? Zip. CSV? Text. EXE? Zip. SVG? Text. DOCX? Zip. ICS? Text. APK? Zip.
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
New LLM writing tic noticed: unnecessarily saying “skips X entirely”
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rain 🌦️ @sunshowers.io · 02/06/2026
iddqd, or the hardest kind of unsafe Rust. My first post for the @oxide.computer blog! Goes deep into the pitfalls of unsafe Rust and how to reason about it. A lot of labor went into the post -- please have a read! oxide.computer/blog/iddqd-u...
oxide.computer
iddqd, or the hardest kind of unsafe Rust | Oxide Computer Company
How our Rust collections library defends against adversarial trait implementations.
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
My favourite features so far: 1. jj rebase -i — being able to select files, chunks etc visually to push onto a change is super nice 2. Editing the state of the tree without being on a change! 3. Super smooth merging/rebasing
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
I have learned jujutsu and I get all the love now. Can see it flat out replacing git in my work going forward Thanks for another great dev tutorial @steveklabnik.com!
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
GitHub is doing an interesting job of speed running losing trust
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James Munns @jamesmunns.com · 23/04/2026
media.tenor.com
a man wearing a blonde wig and a mustache is standing in front of a green forest .
Alt: a man wearing a blonde wig and a mustache is standing in front of a green forest
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Onto #tokioconf lightning talks I’m super excited by the visibility from dial9. The tracing spans and visualisation of Tokio is awesome. We’ve been bitten by slow polling tasks before, this will make it so easy to see
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
…segueing into my plug for DSQL, we’re hiring engineers at a range of levels as we grow the team www.amazon.jobs/en/search?ba...
amazon.jobs
Amazon's global career site
<p>Every Amazonian, from warehouse floor to corporate HQ, shares a drive to impact the future, today. Our unmatched scale offers every employee endless opportunity to reimagine how customers shop, str...
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Also great to see how many companies are hiring roles for Rust/tokio engineers. The death of the engineer is greatly over exaggerated
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Enjoying the first day of talks at #tokioconf! Lots of databases so far, feeling at home
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Carl Lerche @carllerche.com · 31/03/2026
We are 3 weeks out from the first @tokioconf.com. Spoiler: This is the t-shirt! I just saw the design and had to share it. It is so exciting to see it all come together. You still have time to get tickets, but not much time! tokioconf.com.
TokioConf T-Shirt
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Carl Lerche @carllerche.com · 31/03/2026
I finally published Toasty (async Rust ORM) crates! I’ll be writing about it soon (and why it took so long). github.com/tokio-rs/toa...
github.com
GitHub - tokio-rs/toasty: An async ORM for Rust (incubating)
An async ORM for Rust (incubating). Contribute to tokio-rs/toasty development by creating an account on GitHub.
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TokioConf @handle.invalid · 12/03/2026
We're setting aside 20 free TokioConf tickets for contributors and open source maintainers. If you've submitted a PR to any tokio-rs, hyperium, or tower-rs repo, that's you. Know someone who qualifies? Send them our way! tokio.rs/blog/2026-03...
tokio.rs
Free TokioConf tickets for contributors and open source maintainers | Tokio - An asynchronous Rust runtime
Tokio is a runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. It provides async I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, and more.
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
I will also be at Tokio Conf next month! Really looking forward to meeting more folk working on and with Tokio. There’s some great talks scheduled, including one by my colleague Pooja Kale on how DSQL uses Tokio in its control plane
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Great blog from Russell Cohen on dial9. I saw a demo of this recently and it is very cool. Exactly the visibility that’s been missing for Tokio tokio.rs/blog/2026-03...
tokio.rs
Introducing dial9: a flight recorder for Tokio | Tokio - An asynchronous Rust runtime
Tokio is a runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. It provides async I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, and more.
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
You can think of it like the execution time of a lambda, which for the same code will vary across executions. The average will be stable, but there will be some amount of variation
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
The compute DPU part is kind of intrinsically variable. We do have bounds on the variability but there will always be some amount that the compute time can vary due to nondeterminism in execution time, vs bytes read or written which will be stable across the same query.
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
This blog from Marc Bowes is a great starter on DSQL pricing: marc-bowes.com/dsql-how-to-... The tldr is it’s very cheap for small projects
marc-bowes.com
Aurora DSQL: How to spend a dollar
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
DSQL just launched support for SEQUENCES and IDENTITY columns. It’s exciting seeing the team launch new features the same week we became available in four new regions. I wrote a short blog about how we make sure they scale here: blog.benjscho.dev/technical/20...
blog.benjscho.dev
How DSQL Makes Sequences Scale
Sequences are one of those Postgres features that you don’t think much about. You can ask for the next number in the sequence, and you get it. That works pretty well when you have one machine asking f...
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Marc Brooker @marcbrooker.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. At best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero. At best, near-zero. What does that mean for the future? New blog post: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02...
brooker.co.za
You Are Here - Marc's Blog
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
Bernardo as well, he’s great, used to run Amazons internal Rust build system
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Blaring ads on gas pumps are the peak of American culture
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
This sounds great, we have a skill integration that you might find useful! skills.sh/awslabs/mcp/...
skills.sh
dsql by awslabs/mcp
Discover and install skills for AI agents.
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Murat (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
We introduce LeaseGuard: a Raft-specific lease protocol with a precise spec and fast recovery after crashes. Paper + Implementation linked in our joint (w Jesse @emptysqua.re) blog post below. muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/leas...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right!
Many distributed systems have a leader-based consensus protocol at their heart. The protocol elects one server as the "leader" who receives ...
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 14/12/2025
TIL (thanks to this paper) that common 64-bit systems are only using 48-bits of that to actually address memory. Still leaving a cool 256TB max addressable size
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
The Bf-tree paper from VLDB ‘24 looks neat, it’s a shame the implementation hasn’t been released yet. Maybe a chance for someone Christmas tinkering vldb.org/pvldb/vol17/...
vldb.org
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Zig’s fun, I like the explicit error handling and fast compile times. I struggled a bit getting some of the simpler things set up, like reading from a file, mainly because the documentation is lacking in examples for the latest version
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Tackling advent of code in Zig this year, my day one solution is up: github.com/Benjscho/aoc...
github.com
GitHub - Benjscho/aoc-25: Advent of code
Advent of code . Contribute to Benjscho/aoc-25 development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Darryl Ruggles @darryl-ruggles.cloud · 18/11/2025
darryl-ruggles.cloud/dsql-kabob-s... 🆕 Here is my latest blog introducing a Serverless Multi-Region E-Commerce Platform based on an Amazon Aurora DSQL database. For a database platform I have almost always used DynamoDB due to it being truly serverless and pay as you go. (1️⃣/4️⃣) 🧵
darryl-ruggles.cloud
Aurora DSQL: Serverless E-Commerce Platform
Discover how to build a serverless multi-region e-commerce platform using Aurora DSQL and AWS services in this comprehensive guide
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
My demo from the Amazon Aurora livestream is now up as a VOD on YouTube, you can catch it here: youtu.be/5iFA_7lo9aI?...
youtu.be
Enable AI-powered agents with Aurora DSQL using Strands Agents and MCP
YouTube video by AWS Events
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
What are the best languages for multiprocessor programming right now? Thinking ones that provide strong, safe primitives and good performance. I know Rust works well for this thanks to ownership & releasing of locks on drop. Are there any others that are worth trying?
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
I’ve been blowing through Octavia Butler’s Patternists series over the past few weeks. Love how each of them threads together while standing completely on its own.
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
This blog post from Marc Bowes might help with understanding pricing: marc-bowes.com/dsql-how-to-...
marc-bowes.com
Aurora DSQL: How to spend a dollar
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nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · 27/05/2025
People always ask me “so is AWS using Rust?” Happy to be part of this article shining some light on how Rust is changing the way services are built in AWS.
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Werner @wernervogels.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
In a new guest post from #AWS Sr. Principal Engineers @nikomatsakis.com and Mark Bowes take us inside Aurora DSQL's development from scaling write operations without two-phase commit, to overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and embracing Rust. www.allthingsdistributed.com/2025/05/just...
allthingsdistributed.com
Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story
AWS Senior Principal Engineers, Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes, take us inside Aurora DSQL's development: scaling write operations without two-phase commit, overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and em...
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
Very glad Steve didn’t follow this advice and that the Rust book exists, it’s an incredible resource Writing about something you don’t know is often the best way to _start knowing_
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
I love this paper! It’s a clear way to communicate that both application and infra developers are responsible for how to make things scalable, while splitting those responsibilities neatly
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 12/01/2025
By taking the time to encode some safety property in the type system, you save yourself time and pain down the line in explaining how to use it or preventing misuse
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 12/01/2025
Wrote a short bit about Rust being a “Safe for X” language: blog.benjscho.dev/technical/20... I’ve basically had this article from lwn in my head for a while and it’s a major reason why I love working in Rust, especially on a big project with a lot of other engineers
blog.benjscho.dev
Rust is Safe for X
I love this article from lwn and this conclusion especially: this ability to take a property that the language does not know about and “teach” it to Rust, so that now it is enforced at compile time, i...
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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
Not sure how popular it'll be but I thought this one was pretty good. smbc-comics.com/comic/precise
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eliza🌻 @elizas.website · 03/01/2025
why Rust is the greatest programming language of all time, in one screenshot
error: avoid using labels containing only the digits `0` and `1` in inline assembly
   --> hal-x86_64/src/segment.rs:243:14
    |
243 |             "1:",
    |              ^ use a different label that doesn't start with `0` or `1`
    |
    = help: start numbering with `2` instead
    = note: an LLVM bug makes these labels ambiguous with a binary literal number on x86
    = note: see <https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/99547> for more information
    = note: `#[deny(binary_asm_labels)]` on by default
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
This is why I’m particularly excited for cargo scripts to be stabilized into Cargo. This is just a single file, it doesn’t really need to be a crate
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
Rust is a surprisingly great scripting language. While I could fiddle around with bash, awk or see to get something working, without tests it would be more brittle. Rust makes it easy to create a really handy micro utility without spending a lot of time
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
I’ve been messing around with using Neorg for notes instead of markdown with Obsidian, so I wrote a small converter for all of my existing notes: github.com/Benjscho/md2...
github.com
GitHub - Benjscho/md2norg: markdown to neorg quick converter
markdown to neorg quick converter. Contribute to Benjscho/md2norg development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Ben Schofield @benjscho.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Very nice! I haven’t heard of madsim before, will take a look. I love working with sim tests, would be very frustrating to do this kind of thing without.
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