iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I'm so excited to go on Talking Postgres! One of my fav podcasts! I'll chat about my journey to found Nile and discover Postgres. The podcast has a Discord channel where fans discuss the episode as it is recorded. If you want to join ua live, let me know and I'll send you an invite.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

🚨 New blog alert: Postgres 18 beta 1 was released last week, and includes native support for UUIDv7. Great opportunity to explain why UUIDv7 is a great fit for your database keys, and show you how to use them in PG18. www.thenile.dev/blog/uuidv7

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

Preparing a presentation (this is a draft from early in the year, so probably preparing for Monster Scale). Looks like a mess, but IIRC, the result was actually good.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

I blogged a deep dive on how "drop column" works in Postgres - inspecting the Postgres catalog and dumping data files to discover what Vacuum really does to dropped columns and why it doesn't violate GDPR. www.thenile.dev/blog/drop-co...

Diagram of a page in Postgres data file. The linked blog has a full description of the diagram (and a lot of other info about dropping columns)

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Fountain pen Friday! I asked ChatGPT to imagine the result of Pelikan and Kaweco merger…

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Authentication is part of web security - and as such it can be intimidating. All these attack scenarios, secrets, encryption layers, protocols, mitigations and rules. Luckily, James Mickens summarized all we need to know in his classic paper "This World of Ours":

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Leia also has a message for you.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Just realized that the two books I’m currently reading go well together.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

I asked ChatGPT to roast me, and... I think I have a new elevator pitch. "What do I do? Oh, I'm just here gaslighting Postgres into thinking its SaaS"

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Nile-Auth drop-in UI components are not *just* pretty. They make your app secure by default: These components use cookies and CSRF tokens correctly to protect against XSS and CSRF attacks. Oh, and if you don't like our style, just bring your own Tailwind themes.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Recommended paper: Linear Elastic Caching via Ski Rental (CIDR 25) In which the authors propose a machine-learning optimized, cloud-native, cache algorithm that reduced the TCO of Google Spanner by 15% (!). www.vldb.org/cidrdb/paper... Summary (by a human!) thread 👇

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Siri, what is “buffer overflow”?

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

🚀 PostgreSQL extensions, now effortless on Nile! 35+ extensions—AI search (pgvector), geospatial (PostGIS), full-text search & more—ready to use, no installs needed. Build smarter, faster. 🔗 Read more: www.thenile.dev/blog/announc... 🛠️ Try it: console.thenile.dev #PostgreSQL #Serverless

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

⚡️ We shipped Nile Management API months ago… it’s time to make some noise. thenile.dev/docs/api-ref... 👉 Spin up unlimited free databases in milliseconds  👉 Automate AI agent environments & CI/CD workflows Blog - www.thenile.dev/blog/announc... Try Nile - thenile.dev

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

My husband is doing some home maintenance. I asked him to keep his stuff away from my GitHub repos, just to be on the safe side.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

I don't know either, but here's a good hallucination:

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

POV: enjoying the awesome talks at Monster Scale (by @scylladb.com ) Almost time for mine!

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

PSA: If you are responsible for performance of Postgres DBs, check out POWA. It analyzes your workload, visualizes, provides insights and even suggests indexes that optimize the workload as a whole. Docs: powa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Demo (just click login): demo-powa.anayrat.info/server/

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

Happy #caturday I’m practicing a talk with my very judgmental audience.

Photo showing a laptop screen with keynote and two orange cat ears peeking behind it.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Small things that make me happy #534: Nile's console now has Github authentication 🥳

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Happy#caturday to those celebrating 🎉

Orange Cat, in a soft bed, looking a bit grumpy

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

I heard that doctors sometimes test dementia patients for cognitive skills by asking them to draw a clock, showing the time as 10 past 11. So I asked ChatGPT to do just that, and got an example of "representation bias" - in which a specific image is so common that AIs use it even inappropriately.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

Thank you @cynthiadunlop.bsky.social for the awesome holiday gift! 🎁 💝

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

The video we shared below is one of the earlier Nile videos we recorded. Watching it, I realized that in newer recordings my face looks a bit more orange than I prefer. So I experimented with different lights and LUTs. WDYT?

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Announcing: Holiday Wishes App 🎄❄️☃️ * Personalized,AI-generated, messages for your team * Multi-tenant: Create multiple teams and orgs * Fun AI-generated images Built with @thenile.dev and @v0.dev. How-to video coming soon! holiday-cards-v0.vercel.app

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

You may be doing worse than California!

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

New blog: Bringing @thenile.dev and @cloudflare.social together. Build and deploy low-latency, global, serverless, multi-tenant app, using: - Nile database - Cloudflare Workers - Cloudflare Hyperdrive - Hono - Drizzle www.thenile.dev/blog/nile-cl...

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

My husband moved stuff around my studio and I had to re-setup my camera and light. Not my plan for the evening, but I think I got it.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Introducing pg_karnak: Transactional schema migration across tenant databases. We share how we deliver reliable and scalable schema migration for multi-tenant apps, diving deep into Postgres internals - Extension hooks, transaction events and low-level locking. www.thenile.dev/blog/distrib...

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

We just shipped "Delete Database" button for @thenile.dev, and I'm enjoying it much more than is reasonable. Nile has unlimited databases on all tiers. But there is a very satisfying feeling in connecting to my inner Marie Kondo and deleting databases that no longer spark joy.

Nile database settings page with a big red "delete" button.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

You can learn a lot about an engineer from their laptop.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Thanks to @sethrosen.me who reminded me that I haven't posted any beach photos yet. Photo from 17 miles drive, on the way to Carmel.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Luke wishes everyone a very chill weekend.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

TIL: The collective noun for a group of kittens is "kindle". Example: I am looking forward to cuddle with a kindle of kittens, and a good book on my Kindle.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

New blog post 🖋️ RAG vs. Fine-Tuning: Choosing the Right Approach. In which I explain the differences, the use-cases that fit each method, and the common challenges. www.thenile.dev/blog/fine-tu... And for your convenience, I created a handy chart with the highlights

Inforgraphic, summarizing the highlights of the blog linked in this post.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

So cool to get such insightful feedback for my blog, and from an expert in developer content. Can't wait for @cynthiadunlop.bsky.social's book to come out.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 06/11/2024

New blog 🎉 pgvector 0.8.0 released and available on @thenile.dev I wrote about the new features and the demonstrated the impact of iterative scans and the cost optimization improvement. www.thenile.dev/blog/pgvecto... Its a slow news day, so you may as well enjoy a technical blog.

Nile + pgvector-0.8.0 written on black background

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 02/11/2024

I hope you are all having as cozy weekend as my cat.

White cat cuddling in a colorful blanket by a fireplace.

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Gwen Shapira @gwenshap.bsky.social · 31/10/2024

Me: Peeking under the hood of the libraries you use can be very educational. React:

Code snippet from React. The type of one of the function arguments is DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED.

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