A couple of weeks ago, I was in an internal meeting where our CTO (Adam Prout) was giving a talk to our summer interns. The talk was about the current state of database companies, and how different providers are competing on different facets of their products. As the talk was

tl;dr: we’ve created new SQL commands ( SHOW PROFILE UI, EXPLAIN UI and SHOW PLAN UI) that allow developers to more easily visualize their SingleStoreDB query plans. It’s the little things! I recently tried to define Database Developer Experience, which is where I’ve been spending most of

The first post on this personal blog dates back to December 2012. It’s been more than a decade! As with many others, I’ve always struggled with how to setup my personal website. It is just too enticing to build it “from scratch”, which usually means using a static

In the past few weeks, we saw a few key announcements that point to a new trend in the data infrastructure ecosystem: * Databricks Strikes $1.3 Billion Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML * Snowflake Summit 2023 Announcements (a combined set of announcements from Snowflake that extend its functionality to much

Disclaimer: this blog post is primarily aimed for startup or "scale-up" employees of Business-to-Business (B2B) software companies (i.e., companies that build software products and then sell those to other companies, most commonly through a SaaS subscription model). Furthermore, my experience is mostly in the developer tooling space,

We've all heard that one cannot improve what they can't measure. And this is obviously true about flaky tests in our CI/CD pipelines. At work (SingleStoreDB), we've been struggling with this for years but have recently found a mechanism that allows us to

In the summer of 2015, I interned as a software engineer at a startup based in Portugal called Unbabel. The internship was only two months long, but it was an amazing opportunity which definitely put me on a different footing when it came to start my career abroad in 2016.

Product-led growth (PLG) has been gaining momentum in developer tooling in recent years (it was already popular for consumer-facing products before). The idea behind PLG is simple: instead of relying on traditional sales and marketing techniques, businesses focus on allowing the product to drive growth. In this blog post, I

My job as an Engineering Manager requires me to use Git Blame every single day (this is really not an exaggeration!). In this post, I will go into a few different things: 1. The GitLens VSCode Extension (my "Git Blame" stack) 2. Optimizing code for Git Blame Git

Table of Contents * What's not discussed here? * The 8 Pillars of Database DX (in no particular order) * #1 Observability * #2 Deployment * #3 Configurability of Tradeoffs * #4 Predictable Pricing * #5 Programming Language SDKs/Drivers/Clients * #6 Integrations With Well-Known Data Tools * #7 Language Ergonomics * #8 Community & Documentation * Parting

tl;dr: I will show you how I ran some simple analytics on my Google Calendar history over almost 7 years. I used SingleStoreDB for this, but it should be straightforward to do this with any database. Skip to the second part if you don’t care about the technical

A plethora of outstanding literature exists with the goal of helping software engineers make a greater impact and grow in their careers. Just a few examples include: * Staff Engineer by Will Larson * The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly * The Coding Career Handbook by Shawn Wang but there’s

Did you know TypeScript has an API that allows you to write scripts that make certain checks on your code? It's very rarely useful for application developers, but it's used by IDE plugins and linting tools (e.g., ESLint). Interestingly, in the last year, we'

Before I was actually getting paid to write code, I got extremely accustomed to picking up new frameworks and libraries very quickly. I'd bootstrap a new web application in Rails in one week, but then the next week I'd be using Python and Flask for a

I wrote some code over 2 years ago that couldn't be properly typed with either Flow [https://flow.org/] or TypeScript [https://www.typescriptlang.org/], but with the introduction of Variadic Tuple Types [https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/pull/39094] coming in TypeScript 4.0, I decided to

Disclaimer: this article assumes intermediate knowledge of both TypeScript and React. Concepts you should be familiar with include Higher Order Components [https://reactjs.org/docs/higher-order-components.html] and utility TypeScript types such as Pick<T, K> and Omit<T, K> [https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/

Lately, I've been thinking about how one can decide whether to annotate or let TypeScript infer the types of variables/expressions whenever it can. If you don't know what Type Inference is, refer to the official guide [https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-inference.html]. If

We recently ported MemSQL Studio [https://www.memsql.com/manage/]'s 30 thousand lines of JavaScript from using Flow to TypeScript. In this article, I describe why we ported our codebase, how it took place and how it has been working out for us. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer: my goal with

Recently, I was struggling with integrating redux-form [https://redux-form.com/] into a TypeScript [http://www.typescriptlang.org/] project. I hit a couple of bugs in the type definitions for this project, and I went into my node_modules and fixed them. Of course, as a good open source citizen, I

I've been using Flow [https://flow.org/] at work for more than a year and there's a few things that I really wish I had known from the start. Some of these could have been found by simply reading the entire documentation from start to finish

Around a year and a half ago, I transitioned from a full time onsite position to a full time remote position (same employer). Many friends and coworkers tried to pick my mind on why I ended up working remotely. It was unexpected, especially because I had been a bit vocal