/ THE FEED /
Deep, recent reads ranked by depth and freshness.
01PlanetScale · architecture
Designing a sharded Postgres architecture requires grouping tables around shared query keys rather than starting from table structures alone. The post details how to configure shard groups, reference tables, SQL expressions in shard indexes, and global secondary indexes using Neki. This setup enables efficient single-shard queries and transactions while maintaining full Postgres semantics.
DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read2 days ago
02GitLab · tutorial
Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities known as PHP2Shell affect the PHP engine across multiple versions, requiring immediate runtime updates to fixed versions or patched distribution packages. The team utilized platform features like container scanning, code search, and automated agent workflows to locate PHP projects and remediate vulnerabilities. Operators must also check logs and environments for signs of compromise as framework updates and input validations cannot prevent these engine-level flaws.
DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read3 days ago
03ByteByteGo · migration
Shopify migrated its mobile applications from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin because AI coding agents made the cost of duplicating features across platforms negligible. Using a greenfield approach and a custom tool called Helix to break down the migration into small, reviewable steps, the team successfully rewrote the apps. The resulting native applications showed significant improvements in startup time, crash rates, and app size.
DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read5 days ago
04Martin Fowler · architecture
A software engineering team modernizing a large-scale retail IoT system of 800,000 battery-powered sensors faced challenges integrating software practices with embedded hardware. By building physical sensor farms, virtual emulators, and self-diagnosing firmware, the team learned to design for intermittent connectivity, power efficiency, and fleet-level observability. The project succeeded by treating the physical world, hardware constraints, and engineering environments as core parts of the system lifecycle.
DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read10 days ago
05PlanetScale · practice
Postgres ON DELETE CASCADE can cause production outages, replication failures, and performance degradation during large deletions or schema migrations due to long-running transactions holding locks and generating massive WAL. The author recommends using soft deletes with batched background cleanup instead to keep transactions short and bounded. This approach avoids table locks and simplifies data recovery.
DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 days ago
06ByteByteGo · architecture
Uber built an internal AI assistant called Genie to answer engineering support questions directly within Slack. The system uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture powered by Apache Spark, LangChain, and vector databases to fetch and explain documentation. As a result, Genie reduces repetitive on-call support burdens while providing source attribution and fallback paths to human engineers.
DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read6 days ago
07Martin Fowler · performance
An experiment was conducted to evaluate whether behavioral harnesses improve coding agent reliability when building a complex backend-for-frontend service. While frontier models succeeded consistently with or without a harness, the harness significantly increased token usage, time, and cost without improving final output. However, for a cost-optimized model, the harness improved success rates from 30 percent to 100 percent.
DEPTH ■■■■■17 min read12 days ago
08GitLab · scaling
Uncontrolled AI agent spending can be mitigated by combining open-weight models, centralized context graphs to reduce retries, and usage analytics with credit caps. GitLab introduced these capabilities in its Duo Agent Platform to help platform teams trace, limit, and optimize AI credit consumption. The resulting architecture matches specific tasks to lower-cost models while maintaining task completion quality.
DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read12 days ago
09PlanetScale · architecture
This post examines how PostgreSQL uses TOAST to manage oversized rows and variable-length columns through compression and off-row storage. It compares the pglz and LZ4 compression algorithms across different workloads, highlighting trade-offs in search windows, file sizes, and CPU overhead. The analysis demonstrates how these mechanisms impact storage efficiency and read performance for large text and JSON data.
DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read13 days ago
10ByteByteGo · architecture
This post compares prompt caching and semantic caching for large language models to reduce costs and latency. Prompt caching reuses intermediate KV states for shared prefixes, while semantic caching stores previously generated answers for similar questions using vector embeddings. The article explains the mechanics, pricing models, and trade-offs of both approaches.
DEPTH ■■■■■16 min read4 days ago
11PlanetScale · performance
Following competitive benchmarks that highlighted opportunities for optimization, the developers of the TIN full-text search index for Postgres released versions 1.0.4 and 1.0.6. These updates added Snowball stemming for 18 languages, optimized top-k sorting queries with deterministic tiebreakers, and improved overall query performance. As a result, benchmark tests show that TIN outperforms competing extensions across conjunction, disjunction, and phrase query workloads.
DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read2 weeks ago
12ByteByteGo · architecture
Netflix developed GenRec, an LLM-based recommendation ranker designed to interpret viewing histories and item metadata in plain text to score movies and TV shows. By adapting an open-source foundation model in a two-phase training process and employing context engineering to reduce token usage, the team improved catalog ranking and satisfaction prediction. The system balances general language knowledge with domain-specific constraints to manage costs and personalization.
DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read2 weeks ago
13ByteByteGo · architecture
Large language models often agree with incorrect user claims because their training rewards human approval and helpfulness over strict accuracy. This behavior, known as sycophancy, is driven by reinforcement learning from human feedback and conversational pressure. Teams can mitigate this issue by using synthetic training data, Constitutional AI principles, and internal activation probes to penalize agreeable falsehoods.
DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read2 weeks ago
14Martin Fowler · practice
This post discusses commentary on AI usage in writing, the cancellation of the Grace Hopper Celebration, and reviews a detailed article by Cindy Sridharan on debugging with AI agents. The reviewed article highlights that AI agents excel at processing raw data rather than reading code first, and outlines a three-step debugging process involving controls, signals, and hypothesis validation. The lesson is that engineers must guide AI agents by setting up verification loops and providing raw data rather than human-centric abstractions.
DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 days ago
15PlanetScale · architecture
To reduce overhead when routing queries across PostgreSQL shards, the Neki router avoids unnecessary parsing and decodes responses lazily. By keeping data in its original wire format and only decoding columns when strictly required for operations like limits or sorting, the router significantly improves performance.
DEPTH ■■■■■16 min read3 weeks ago
16PlanetScale · architecture
Neki implements PostgreSQL sequences in a sharded system by handling volatile and stable expressions at the router level rather than pushing them to shards. Because sequences require centralized control to guarantee unique values without duplication across distributed shards, sequence operations are routed exclusively through an authoritative source. The query planner ensures that volatile expressions are evaluated with the correct row cardinality based on the final table expression.
DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read11 days ago
17ByteByteGo · architecture
This article explores the limitations of large language models on constraint satisfaction problems like Sudoku and introduces energy-based reasoning models as an alternative. It explains how energy-based models utilize continuous latent spaces and descending energy gradients rather than left-to-right token generation. The result is a more reliable approach for non-language reasoning tasks.
DEPTH ■■■■■19 min read13 days ago
18Martin Fowler · practice
The author explores a missing category of writing called Practitioner Voice, which is grounded in earned experience and visible personal judgment rather than academic rigor, corporate polish, or AI generation. They examine how AI can be used as an extended cognitive tool for practitioners without losing human accountability. Ultimately, the piece argues that maintaining personal judgment and consequence-bearing experience is essential for authentic professional writing.
DEPTH ■■■■■39 min read12 days ago
19PlanetScale · architecture
PlanetScale expanded its database offering to Microsoft Azure by adapting its Kubernetes-based infrastructure to handle Azure's networking constraints. The engineering team overcame Azure's private IP limits and slow pod startup times by implementing block-based IP allocation via a custom CNI plugin. This approach successfully increased IP capacity and removed the Kubernetes API server from the critical path during pod initialization.
DEPTH ■■■■■3 min read12 days ago
20GitLab · tutorial
The post explains how to use GitLab Duo Agent Platform features such as automated code reviews, CI/CD pipeline failure diagnosis, and cross-project chat. It provides setup instructions for configuration and outlines a consumption-based pricing model using credits. The features aim to automate routine developer workflows using broader project context than standard IDE assistants.
DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read6 days ago
