There’s a photograph in the American mind we’ve never quite gotten over. A single earner: a machinist, a mid-level insurance man, a schoolteacher, buys a house, raises three kids, takes a two-week vacation, and retires with a pension. He doesn’t own a company. He has no stock options. He’s labor,…

ClickHouse was released in open source on Jun 15 2016, ten years ago. Since then, it became the most popular open source analytical database with more than 2000 contributors. Building in the open There are different levels of open-source. Level 0: The minimum level is making the code open to the…

The Letterboxd logo. Intro: All of Film Knowledge, for Free The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was founded in 1990—an almost inconceivable fact for a website that holds present-day relevance. The site began as a series of Usenet message boards and later evolved into an encyclopedic reference point…

Founders are the risk-takers and visionaries who drive our economy forward. They take bold bets, build teams, and pursue ideas that could reshape entire industries. But the reality is that not all startups make it. The statistics remain stark: 93% of startups ultimately shut down. What has changed…

These days it is so easy to make rapid progress—websites in minutes, full apps in hours, whole distributed systems in days—that we software engineers begin to wonder what our job really is. It surely isn’t writing code anymore, 99% of the time. Is it reviewing code? That seems like a losing battle…

Eduardo Ramos for Unsplash+ Snowflake sponsored this post. For most of its 30-year history, Postgres has been viewed as a transactional database. Organizations trust it with customer records, financial transactions, and countless other operational workloads. Its reputation was built on reliability,…

The most common single-line origin story: “I had the problem myself, so I built a product.” This is the standard defense mounted by new founders to justify their new ventures. But is it justified? For a company to succeed, many conditions must be true⁠—or true enough that they’re not fatal. Those…

DuckDB has gone from a research project at CWI Amsterdam in 2019 to one of the most widely adopted databases of the past decade. The list of places it shows up is long: notebooks, ETL pipelines, dashboards, CI test runners, embedded analytics inside SaaS products, even an iPhone running TPC-H at…

From the moment the technology arrived to allow personal digital assistants (PDAs)1 a connection to the internet, people started connecting them to the internet, as is the natural order of things. Initially their connections were just for the most fledgeling of information fetching, but as the ’90s…

It’s obvious that most books aren’t efficient information transfer devices. There are few people who have 300 pages of compelling information to share with you, and, even if they do, what are the odds that you, in particular, need to hear those 300 pages of information? And what are the odds that…

JSON-LD, also known as JSON Linked Data, is a format for adding structured data to webpages. It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking. It’s been 4 months since my first…

How hard is anything now? I don't know. Jun 22, 2026 So: Lots of work is easier because of LLMs, and Lots of heuristics we used to gauge effort are broken because of LLMs, so Conveying effort to others is harder because of LLMs And: “Someone spent time on this” is a proxy for “this is worth engaging…

There is great anxiety and uncertainty about AI replacing jobs. How can we move past vague warnings and bombastic predictions and bring data to bear on this question? One good way is to look at the profession where AI capabilities are furthest along and adoption has been exceptionally rapid:…

There's a narrative gaining traction in our industry: software engineering is dead, AI can write all the code, and therefore you don't need a technical co-founder. Just be the subject matter expert, point the agents at the problem, and ship. I think this is exactly wrong. More and more, I'm hearing…

Dubbed the “king of cashmere” by The New Yorker, Brunello Cucinelli is the founder of the eponymously named fashion house that is well-known for making luxury cashmere sweaters (and more than $450 million a year in revenues). He started his company in 1978, and, now 61, he lives in Solemeo, Italy,…

November 2021 The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks High finance is a foreign country; they do things differently there Today will I take you through the keyhole to look at a group of software systems not well known to the public, which I call "Bank Python". Bank Python…

A bit over a year ago I wrote How I use LLMs as a staff engineer. Here’s a brief summary of what I used AI for last year: Smart autocomplete with Copilot Short tactical changes in areas I don’t know well (always reviewed by a SME) Writing lots of use-once-and-throwaway research code Asking lots of…

Making devenv start fast, and the whole nixpkgs with it I'm sitting here next to Farid Zakaria at Tacosprint where we looked at the stat storm that has been haunting nixpkgs for a decade. devenv auto activation runs devenv hook-should-activate on every shell prompt to decide whether you've stepped…

Story time: How I started coding Feb 9, 2017 last updated May 30, 2026 personal 8 minute readImage © Soupmeister Update (October 2020): I recently shared a longer and more in-depth version of my story with Tim of the DevJourney podcast, which you can listen to here. We got our first computer in the…

A company can learn a lot about the market by looking at its own employees. OpenAI says that its team members are switching from chatbots to agents as their primary form of AI interaction, a trend also detected (though less pronounced) among external organizations and users. Instead of one-off…

I’ve been running a mixed Proxmox cluster for years – four nodes of wildly different capability, from an Atom x5-Z8350 with 2 GB of RAM (a z83ii, currently offline after years of faithful service as a baseline torture device) up to an i7-12700 with 128 GB (borg, my main homelab server). This year,…

The US Census Bureau counts businesses as well as people. Four years ago, it made a major change to its business methodology. Until 2022, the Census Bureau assumed that businesses over a given revenue threshold must have employees. Even if a business declared itself a solo enterprise, it was…

A friend of mine once interviewed at a venture firm that no longer exists (funny how that works). Every alarm bell that could possibly go off was going off during the process. Red flags everywhere. Sirens blaring. And yet, he pressed ahead anyway. One of the junior team members invited him out to…

Getty Images for Unsplash+ Over the past few months, four AI giants quietly rebuilt the same thing at once: AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic each shipped agent runtime updates that point to the same architectural shift. Microsoft rebuilt its Foundry-hosted agents in April around per-session…

Here’s the thing about senior leadership that nobody warns you about: the job isn’t hard because of any single task. It’s hard because your work lives in fifteen different places and your brain is the only system connecting them. Meetings bleed into each other. Decisions are made in threads without…

It's been a while since I swapped over to Immich from Google Photos, but one of the small things I miss after moving my photo library away isn't cloud storage, easy sharing, or even AI-based editing. It's actually the daily reminders that used to bring back old memories to the surface. Sometimes,…

David Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, has been named head of the Department of Economics, effective July 1. “David is a world-class labor economist,” says Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social…

Why programming sucks and how to fix it 2026-03-07 · 13 min · #computing Programming sucks. Code sucks. It's hard to read, hard to test, and hard to maintain. Only a handful of people can understand any particular software project. These are major problems. I'm here to explain how we can fix them.…

When getting into the home-labbing world, the first thing that most people self-host is their photo library. Camera rolls do nothing but grow, and it's one of the easiest things to move off the cloud and onto your own hardware. All it really takes is launching an Immich instance you can point your…

Published: Jun 25, 2026written by Vanja Subotic, PhD Philosophy Ethics isn’t just about rules of conduct; it’s the messy, urgent project of deciding how to live and what kind of person you want to be. Should we chase happiness at all costs? Obey duty? Question authority? Many philosophers believe…

The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170,…

Stop Downloading to /tmp: Modernizing AWS Lambda + S3 Workloads with Amazon S3 Files Sharan Sutrapu 4 min read·1 day ago Press enter or click to view image in full size Simplify your serverless architectures by mounting S3 directly as a local file system. AWS Lambda functions that interact with…

Every founder receives the question on slide three. What is your moat? They answer with technical differentiation. A model, a dataset, an architecture. At the application layer, that answer dissolves in a year. What if there is no immediate moat? What if the moat is earned? Leading moats exist at…

This week we released a directory of research covering venture capital and adjacent fields. Today, the directory features 135 papers that span from the 1980s to 2026, covering market cycles, regulatory changes and systemic shifts in the industry. Regular readers of The Odin Times will recognise many…

👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I answer reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lenny’s Podcast | Lennybot | How I AI | My favorite AI/PM courses, public speaking course, and interview prep copilot P.S. Get a full free year of Google AI,…