iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Interviewed an LLM recently for a system design interview. Candidate responded every question with a 5 second lag. There was a bit of eye shifting, but *very* subtle. The answers were unnaturally fluent and canonical.

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

The peril of laziness lost bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/t...

bcantrill.dtrace.org

The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

I think I have completed my five stage of grief (AI edition): denial:"AI is overhyped" anger: "AI code is a sloppy mess!" bargaining: "maybe AI will stay at jr. eng level..." depression: "does craftsmanship still matter?" acceptance: "well, at least I don't have to write boilerplate code anymore..."

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

This has been my observation, but curious if anyone else feel this way: - if you are a builder at heart, using AI to code energizes you - if you are a craftsman at heart, using AI to code feels like it’s taking something away from you

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 18/02/2026

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

Book cover of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition". It has a similar wild boar on the cover as the first edition, but it uses O'Reilly's new cover design, and the boar is now slightly colourised.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Nobody: Me: honey I think I finally have an explanation for why you have better senses (taste/smell/vision) than me: my ancestors invented agriculture earlier than yours, and evolution pruned my expensive sensory hardware to adapt to the modern world, while you are still fit for hunter-gatherer

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Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

One thing I'm excited about with The Consensus is giving you a hub to find interesting 1) jobs and 2) events going on in systems programming.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

I will be speaking at the Monster Scale Summit this year to talk about ClickPipes. Hope to see you there! 😊

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Eric Wastl @was.tl · 03/12/2025

If you're curious what it takes to run #AdventOfCode every year, I have a talk called Advent of Code: Behind the Scenes that you might enjoy: youtu.be/uZ8DcbhojOw

youtu.be

Keynote: Advent of Code, Behind the Scenes - Eric Wastl

YouTube video by CppNorth

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Happy advent of code month!

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Nobody: Me: (in k8s land) if a replicaSet contains only one pod, is it still a *replica* set?

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

This is so cliche but it is also so true — every time I grow in life/career is when I find myself in a situation I’m not ready/comfortable with. I love routine, but have to keep reminding myself to break it from time to time.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Just like how human are bad at writing correct concurrent code, we are also bad at solving concurrent problems in our lives (both leads to *panic*, lol) So the advice of only introduce concurrency if you must applies as life advice too: solve one problem at a time, multitask only if you must.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

This is great and to-the-point.

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Eric Wastl @was.tl · 22/10/2025

Hello, friends! After 10(!) years of #AdventOfCode, I've made some changes to preserve my sanity: there will be 12 days of puzzles each December (still starting Dec 1) and there is no longer a global leaderboard. Read more: adventofcode.com/2025/about#f... adventofcode.com/2025/about#f...

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

Quite optimistic about this project and the great people behind it.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

Really great opportunity for those who want to learn more about sync engines / building real time applications.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Now that we have all retreated from Monday’s world wide war rooms… anybody beat this chaos monkey on hard mode?

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

People are like programming languages, with personalities on a spectrum between strongly typed and weakly typed. The strongly typed prefer routines, structures, and consistency; the weakly typed prefer and thrive in a dynamically changing environment. Yes I am strongly typed 😆

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

We are hiring an EM for the database integration team (ClickPipes) at ClickHouse! job-boards.greenhouse.io/clickhouse/j...

job-boards.greenhouse.io

Engineering Manager - Database Integrations

United States (remote)

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

Great blogpost summarizing a paper that I now must read.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

One of my favourite things about working at ClickHouse (and storage systems in general) is we get to nerd out on performance optimizations constantly.

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Filippo Valsorda @filippo.abyssdomain.expert · 10/09/2025

Woke up this morning to find my gophers playing Go. Huh.

A plush purple gopher and a plush red gopher are playing Go on a wooden board. The purple gopher, on the left, has an open tin of white stones, one on its nose, with a few placed on the board. The red gopher on the right stands next to a tin full of black stones, with a few placed on the board. A large, black-and-white print of a city skyline hangs on the wall behind them. A copy of The Onion sits next to the board.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

When working on an international team, one thing I learned is that interpersonal communication and team culture is navigated very differently from when the entire team comes from a similar cultural background.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

Netflix had it all wrong, don’t waste engineering resources to build your own chaos monkey infrastructure, just put production on AWS us-east-1 and you get chaos monkey for free. Just kidding, just kidding…

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

Short visit to Bay Area. Caltrains got a lot nicer but a lot less commuters comparing to pre-pandemic.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

It's so gratifying to introduce new users to ClickHouse's powerful JSON data type; and seeing their reaction when they test out its performance for the first time. If you like a good technical reading, don't miss out on this blogpost: clickhouse.com/blog/a-new-p...

clickhouse.com

How we built a new powerful JSON data type for ClickHouse

We’re excited to introduce our new and significantly enhanced JSON data type, purpose-built to deliver high-performance handling of JSON data. Our core engineer, Pavel Kruglov, dives into how we built...

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

JSON data type is one of my favorite features at ClickHouse for its elegant design and impressive performance. Now, excited to share what our team has been working on over the last few months to bring this feature to more people. clickhouse.com/blog/mongodb...

clickhouse.com

MongoDB CDC to ClickHouse with Native JSON Support, now in Private Preview

Learn about the launch of the private preview of our MongoDB CDC connector in ClickPipes, ClickHouse Cloud’s native ingestion service.

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Ben @benjdd.com · 11/08/2025

I'm a big fan of choosing the right tool for the job. As much as I love Postgres and MySQL, these are optimized for OLTP workloads. When you have an analytical / time-series need, Clickhouse is a great choice. Read the paper this weekend. Tons of interesting engineering!

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

I love this piece from @charity.wtf -- it's so well articulated and deeply meaningful. I also love how many people resonated with it -- on a fundamental level we are all truth/purpose seekers

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Well, this explains why the 2 mile long FAA corridor extending off the airport runway is off-limits to kiteboarders.

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ClickHouse @clickhouse.com · 24/07/2025

We are live with the ClickHouse 25.7 release webinar. Join us for demos & Q/A www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Ts...

youtube.com

ClickHouse v25.7 Release Webinar

YouTube video by ClickHouse

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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 06/07/2025

If you configure the Supabase MCP with read-write support it's easy to open yourself up to lethal trifecta attacks where an attacker can e.g. write a message in a support ticket with instructions that cause an MCP client to retrieve and leak data from other tables simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/6/s...

simonwillison.net

Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database

Here's yet another example of a lethal trifecta attack, where an LLM system combines access to private data, exposure to potentially malicious instructions and a mechanism to communicate data back …

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

This essay by Nisheeth Vishnoi is a thoughtful meditation on the nature of science and a rebuttal to the notion that AI systems are going replace human scientists anytime soon. Worth reading. nisheethvishnoi.substack.com/p/what-count...

nisheethvishnoi.substack.com

What Counts as Discovery?

Rethinking AI’s Place in Science

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

As much as I enjoy watching a good drama, the amount of drama in the database industry is a bit too much 😬

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Nerdy computer analogy that runs between my partner and I: he's the latest M4 with 16 core, while I'm the single processor IBM mainframe. Reasons are ...

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Friday thought: i majored in accounting but realized I didn’t enjoy auditing work so switched to computer science. Now a decade later I realize I am gradually transitioning back into an auditor (of AI code) 🙈

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Genuinely curious since i've been out of this space for a while: it's 2025, how long does it take for your data to get from your db to your data warehouse? 1 hour? 1 minute? 10 seconds? subsecond? And what do you consider as sufficient?

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

I know this isn’t rocket science, but embarassingly enough, it took me a while to figure out: If you like databases, work for a database company. Anyways, one week into ClickHouse and I am impressed at how well it operates and how smart/kind the people are. Looking forward to keep learning.

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Joy Gao @joygao.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

Fun fact: What does BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Doris/StarRocks have in common? They all have lineage that originated from search engine companies. BigQuery - Google ClickHouse - Yandex Doris/StarRocks - Baidu

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Anton Zhiyanov @antonz.org · 15/05/2025

Recently, I was working on an application that needed to know if it was connected to the internet. I didn't want to use ping (ICMP), and wanted to exercise the full stack used by real HTTP clients: DNS, TCP, and HTTP. So I did some digging, and here are the results: antonz.org/is-online/

antonz.org

Am I online?

Checking internet connectivity with 'generate 204' endpoints.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 14/05/2025

Nonmonotonic clock spotted in the wild: I left `ping` running in the background on my laptop while it went to sleep, and later I found that my minimum round-trip time was a negative number!

Screenshot of the last few lines of pinging google.com. 21451 packets transmitted, 0.6% packet loss. Round-trip min = -289.777 ms, avg = 40.446 ms, max = 3763.579 ms, stddev = 112.306 ms

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