iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

made a little pirate map spinner for something I'm working on. Just plain SVG + React just an Euler spiral as f(t), superposition of waves for speed & cup modeling w/ addl waveshaping for other paper quirks Surprisingly performant on old computers!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

finally revamped my website ~ same fonts, same overall design, but more about where I currently am and what I've done. & more diagrams & videos First time ever I'm talking about my previous music career on this platform, so I added a page about that too. after all, why not

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Dives already support near-instant crossfiltering on millions/billions of rows. We're now working on making it a native part of the experience with some new primitives low latency makes whole new classes of interactions possible!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

everything they're saying about it is true: GLM 5.2 really DOES have all the info it needs to write the plan

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

⌯⌲ Introducing Flights, a new agent-native data pipeline tool Author in python / SQL, trigger in SQL + MCP + on a schedule. I use it for data pipelines, but also for agent workflows, classical ML tasks, screenshotting Dives and posting to Slack, you name it. Give it a spin in Motherduck!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I've been reflecting on this post. If people are actually getting 10x or 100x gains, this indicates that per-developer productivity gains from AI don't convert to revenue very well. So either people are working on the "wrong thing" (very likely) or the gains are more modest (also likely)

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Happy National Paper Airplane Day! I made a little parametric mini-app to figure out good angles for a paper airplane hero. Another fun 3d svg modeling task. Favorite parts are the particle occlusion and ribbon trail I promise this content will make sense soon

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I've been using Claude artifacts to create parametric systems for icon development. While models are only sort-of good at drawing svg, they're obviously quite good at getting basic math right. Especially helpful for getting 16x16 footprints to feel nice usually I can do the rest

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

iterating on a fun little isometric paper airplane loading hero for a new feature I'm excited about. Thinking about how to mitigate the ink trap problem while keeping the simplicity of three shapes

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

This break, I've been building a constraint-based implementation of a new time series axis component. The goal is to make it nice & comprehensible for any size / time range It's a nice pattern: React part of it is simple, the TS part is complex / well-tested, and the dev UI uses the test cases

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

Continuing the semantic code-folding design exploration. Instead of showing the typical "..." button, it shows an LLM summary of what's folded. Like "calculate 30-day revenue" for a collapsed CTE. Not sure if this would be useful yet!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I like the “retvrn to terminals” discourse around UIs, but imo it misses why old terminal programs were (or were not) good. So it’s a boring aesthetic argument and not a functional one based on how humans consume information.

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

only took me two years before I needed to do my own safety triangle implementation this works great for our upcoming "quick look" editor features aside from function docs, what other quick look features would you like in the DuckDB UI?

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

My Data Council talk on Instant SQL is up on YouTube! Instant SQL is MotherDuck's new realtime ad hoc querying and data debugging mode. I go into details, but the talk itself is really about designing tools that both require mastery AND enable joyful flow. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSeB...

youtube.com

Instant Preview Mode Real Time Feedback to Make SQL Data Exploration Fly

YouTube video by Data Council

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

I'm going to be talking online about the "why" and "how" of Instant SQL, our new ad hoc querying experience that enables keystroke-fast previews of results & deeper introspection into your query's data flow. Weds. May 21st, 9:30am PDT link in reply!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

So thrilled to announce we've released Instant SQL in both the MotherDuck and DuckDB UIs! It's a new interaction pattern for writing SQL queries that provides realtime result previews and deep query inspection & debugging. Bye bye run button 👋 Truly, literally only possible with DuckDB

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Instant Preview Mode has been achieved internally

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Migrating over my DuckDB AST path generation code to our UI. The way I've done gut-checks on the grammar is to use this CodeMirror semantic highlighting extension I wrote We can implement a very long tail of unique features with the path generator, including instant preview mode

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

So thrilled the DuckDB UI is out to the world! Read the post, but wanted to also share a couple small design details we thought about in thread

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

a gratifying animation (and much lower instance size changing times in the MotherDuck UI)

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Reposted by Hamilton Ulmer

MotherDuck @motherduck.com · 10/03/2025

Are you ready? 03.12.2025

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

The prod push begins ... starting with my TS-based re-parse of the DuckDB grammar to get the end positions of AST nodes & all clauses of select & set operation nodes. This tedious work enables a long tail of hot UI magic. Can't wait to deprecate it once we have the PEG parser!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

new in the MotherDuck UI: a very nice file -> table flow combines duckdb-wasm with MotherDuck to enable easy file validation and previews before taking the CTAS plunge

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Big release day for MotherDuck! We're rolling out a new Business Plan and a bunch of great new features. Cherrypicking a few small design details that I enjoyed working on below (see the blog post for way more data warehouse context!) motherduck.com/blog/introdu...

motherduck.com

MotherDuck for Business Analytics: GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, Tiered Support, and New Plan Offerings - MotherDuck Blog

Introducing new features designed to better support businesses looking for their first data warehouse, including SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, tiered support, read scaling, and a new Business Pla...

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Reposted by Hamilton Ulmer

Hannes Mühleisen @hannes.muehleisen.org · 07/02/2025

We're testing a new DuckDB install experience for Linux and MacOS: curl install.duckdb.org | bash Happy to hear feedback!

install.duckdb.org

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

First pass at a new DuckDB extension that generates svg time series IN the db (below screenshot copied into figma) and how, using M4 should be trivial! And then setting elem.innerHTML = result even easier One step from effortlessly throwing a thousand low-cost small multiples into any UI

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

I had the privilege of chatting with @jthandy.bsky.social on the Analytics Engineering podcast about – you guessed it – DuckDB, exploratory data analysis, and the messy middle of doing data work. Lots of historical context! listen: www.getdbt.com/blog/interse...

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Working in a DAW, one will loop over a small isolated set of tracks and work out EQ, reverb. etc. The fast feedback loop makes it easy to dial into the right sound, and then you can unmute the rest of your tracks for context. Why doesn't this exact pattern exist for UI tooling?

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Reposted by Hamilton Ulmer

Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

🚀 New DuckDB instant SQL preview feature: decompose result sets in real time! Break apart any select list expression to triage unexpected NULL values and results Scales seamlessly to arbitrarily complex expressions

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

DuckDB's Node client got a huge makeover! I've gotten to watch my colleague Jeff work on it and it's been a masterclass in how to nail the ergonomics. Give it a spin ~ duckdb.org/2024/12/18/d...

duckdb.org

DuckDB Node Neo Client

The new DuckDB Node client, “Neo”, provides a powerful and friendly way to use your favorite database

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

My toddler is extremely into orchestral music. People are always surprised to hear this, but my wife is a professional musician and I used to be. Music is a critical part of our family fabric. It feels very rewarding to have him grow up in the culture; something neither of us quite had.

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

I finally did it. I bought the $160 book on the history of mathematical tables.

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

DuckDB just shipped a rowid filter pushdown! This can be used to get a fast tail of the table. Lots of other great uses for this too! Along w/ the tablesample pushdown PR, DuckDB 1.2 is going to have much faster ways to subset large tables. github.com/duckdb/duckd...

github.com

`rowid` filter pushdown by Maxxen · Pull Request #15020 · duckdb/duckdb

This PR adds support for pushing down static and dynamic filters on the rowid column into table scans. The rowid column is not a real stored column and doesn't have statistics, but since row-id...

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Reposted by Hamilton Ulmer

Jack Rusher @jackrusher.com · 30/11/2024

Inspired by the graphic design of the Penguin paperbacks I grew up reading…

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Do any of my DuckDB experts know how to use sniff_csv (or any table function) on a list of files in a query? I want to apply sniff_csv to each file in a list. I can always do string templating with union all but it'd be nice to keep this pure SQL so I can make a macro out of it. any ideas?

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Nate Sooter ⛳️ @natesooter.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Happy Thanksgiving, especially to all the Export to CSV buttons out there

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

thinking about bringing both this loading spinner in to the MotherDuck app

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Emily Liu @emilyliu.me · 25/11/2024

now you can run `npm install bluesky-comments` to use bluesky replies as your blog's comment section! thanks @coryzue.com 🙌

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Reposted by Hamilton Ulmer

Emily Liu @emilyliu.me · 24/11/2024

While Bluesky looks like other social apps on the surface, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network. I blogged about it here:

emilyliu.me

Benefits of an open network

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 13/09/2024

instant-feedback SQL editing aka "query-as-you-type" uses DuckDB's AST, duckdb-wasm for local-first caching, and MotherDuck as the backend Still early, but should enable arbitrary scale and still retain a near real-time feel while writing ad hoc queries! Bye bye run button 👋

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

IMO SQL is hard because it's nearly impossible to build good tooling for it. And that's because of SQL's grammar (verbose) and parsers (ancient) this @duckdb.org change is huge Exciting times ahead if you work with SQL!

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Ed @eddaword.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

How does one find Design Eng BlueSky? Or Product Dessign Blue Sky?

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

the local regression line is 😙🤌 I bet loess might also be kind of interesting here

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

🚢 just shipped in the MotherDuck UI: Table Summary Click a table/view in your catalogs to see column distributions, top values, & null %s. Plus an easy way to peek at actual rows when you need that security blanket. An easy way to build intuition about your tables w/o having to write SQL!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

do any @bsky.app folks know if it's either possible (or on the roadmap) to allow people I don't currently follow to chat with me?

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