/ 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
03Meta · architecture
Meta engineers reduced hallucinations and improved reliability in their data pipeline agents by replacing a single heavyweight LLM orchestrator with a thin deterministic router and fourteen specialized subagents. The thin orchestrator handles routing and reliability checks through a fixed protocol, while isolated subagents execute domain reasoning. This architecture reduced configuration preparation time from a day to under an hour.
DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read6 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
06Meta · architecture
Meta built Prometheus, a gigawatt-scale AI supercluster designed to scale up to one million GPUs using multi-generation NVIDIA hardware and specialized backend Ethernet networks. The team achieved high goodput and significantly reduced system interruptions by implementing an in-rack sparing strategy, parallelism-aware fault tolerance, and close co-engineering with vendors. These infrastructure advancements allowed the team to successfully train frontier foundational models like Muse Wonder.
DEPTH ■■■■■17 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
09Meta · practice
Meta engineers built the Forum app using a human-on-the-loop AI agent workflow that automated planning, building, testing, and verification. By shifting focus from code generation to automated verification, tooling improvements, and architectural legibility, the team reached feature parity in eight weeks while catching systemic memory issues early.
DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read10 days ago
10PlanetScale · 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
11Meta · architecture
Meta developed GEM, a unified recommendation foundation model using an LLM-style architecture called Kunlun to handle heterogeneous ads data across multiple surfaces. The team implemented block attention, custom low-precision kernels, and post-training intelligence transfer techniques like LoopFM and Solaris to scale training efficiency and bypass real-time serving latency bottlenecks. The resulting system delivered an 18.9% conversion improvement and a 12% click-through rate increase across Meta ads surfaces.
DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read12 days ago
12PlanetScale · 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
13Meta · architecture
Meta shared its next-generation open networking infrastructure for AI at the OCP Summit 2026, including liquid-cooled 102.4T switch platforms, multiplane scale-out fabrics, and Ethernet-based scale-up solutions. The team also highlighted collaborative industry standards like ESUN and OSPA to unify hardware and transport layers. These open innovations aim to support massive gigawatt-scale AI clusters across diverse data center environments.
DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read13 days 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
16Meta · architecture
Meta implemented GenRecs Tokenization to replace dedicated item IDs with a stable semantic vocabulary for ads recommendation. Using a three-stage encoding and quantization pipeline, the system enables language models to reason about ad content and user preferences simultaneously. This approach resulted in a +0.35% lift in conversions and improved cold-start performance for new entities.
DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read6 days ago
17PlanetScale · 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
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
19Meta · scaling
Meta's infrastructure handled record-breaking traffic during the 2026 World Cup, including 30 million messages per second on WhatsApp, by relying on automated load balancing, capacity buffers, and targeted pre-builds. Traffic patterns revealed that surges occurred primarily during breaks rather than gameplay, requiring region-specific forecasting rather than cross-region load shifting. The systems maintained full reliability and allowed normal continuous deployment schedules to continue without manual intervention or system freezes.
DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read10 days ago
20PlanetScale · 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
