David Barrett

Like everyone, we've been thinking a lot about and investing in AI -- here's a quick peek of what's going on at Expensify behind the scenes, and a framework to understand how every large legacy player like us will gradually embrace the change (if at all): use.expensify.com/blog/expensify…

Tech isn't "disruptive" if it doesn't disrupt something: PC disrupted mainframes because it took market away from it. Laptops disrupted PC, mobile disrupted laptops. Subvocal tech like uploadvr.com/apple-acquired… is the missing link for in-ear, always-on AI devices to disrupt mobile.

Whoa, that moment where your build chain is fully connected to AI end-to-end, where it can take a high level bullet list of vague ideas and not merely turn it into a detailed proposal, but an actual PR ready to merge... people talk about it, but experiencing it is something else.

The "diamond org chart" is interesting. Historically each org was a "pyramid", with a wide junior base that gradually narrowed up to a "peak" of senior talent. AI has wiped out entry level jobs, without changing the need for mid-level talent, making a diamond-shaped org chart.

As a DB nerd I was excited to read the @OpenAI post on using a single-leader Postgres cluster (openai.com/index/scaling-…). We're huge fans of scaling "up" rather than "out", with a 384 core, 6TB RAM self-healing database cluster running BedrockDB.com, powered by @sqlite!

Best new AI hack: whenever Gmail fails to do it automatically, take a screenshot of concert/movie/flight tickets in email, and ask Gemini to create a calendar appointment. (I missed a concert last weekend due to entering it for Saturday rather than Friday 😭, never again!)

I don't understand the studies saying 50% of companies that deploy AI didn't see any benefits. We see huge benefits at every layer -- data quality, bug triage, workflow automation, and truly everywhere. Anybody who can't find a way to benefit from AI is soon to be replaced by it.

It's here! Book all your employees' travel on one central card. Also, create dedicated travel links to customize the travel policy for each link! use.expensify.com/blog/expensify…

This thing is very large, very real, and very very cool #tesla of construction youtu.be/fw0o8f7H3Xc?si…

This thing needs to be seen to be believed: the #Tesla of bulldozers is right. @ahmedshubber25 is creating something incredible. businessinsider.com/lumina-tesla-o…

Proof that New Expensify's freelance contributor program is one of the largest and most sophisticated OSS projects in the world: OpenAI used 1488 of our real Upwork jobs to build the authoritative measure of AI coding capabilities. #freelance #OpenSource x.com/OpenAI/status/…

I had some free time this holiday season and wrote up a blog post about how we use NUMA balancing on our 384-CPU, 6TB monster servers to keep the site humming reliably (and some of the challenges we've had to overcome). It's pretty low level, enjoy! use.expensify.com/blog/how-expen…

@ahmedshubber25 It's been an absolute honor. I can't wait for you to share with the world what you've built. This thing is a monster.

I find the whole "cloud exit" trend so confusing. The math on the extreme cost, stability, and performance advantages of self-hosting seemed obvious from the start -- what has changed that has people suddenly realizing this? - use.expensify.com/blog/scaling-s… - arstechnica.com/information-te…

,la ftw.

@rexsalisbury Haha, it was destiny calling my name! Incidentally, check the name on our Expensify Card ads...

@dbarrett whats the story behind your name on all the credit card ads?

@rexsalisbury Haha! When you advertise a credit card, Visa has very strict requirements about what numbers and names you can use, and I think my name is one that is authorized, so it just shows up again and again. It's like I've been encouraged to launch the @expensify card my entire life!

@dbarrett is there an interesting story as to why your name shows up on United ads?

It's a little known fact that @2chainz had an early prototype of the #AppleVisionPro in our Expensify This #SuperBowl music video (youtube.com/watch?v=bU3fit…). I can't believe nobody noticed.

Great question. We have a cluster of six databases using bedrockDB so for large maintenance like that we would simply do them one at a time. For example, changing schema, adding an index, so forth. That said, we are experimenting with ZFS to use snapshots to streamline some of these long database locking maintenance chores (particularly backing up, which we do by splitting the database up In to thousands of small slices that we upload in parallel to cold storage) without taking the server offline.

@dbarrett the SQLite usage as Expensify is really impressive and inspiring (use.expensify.com/blog/scaling-s…). I'm curious how you're dealing with long running database migrations eg. CREATE INDEX on very large tables, considering SQLite locks the entire DB while executing them?

The secret experiment behind the Expensify Lounge use.expensify.com/blog/the-secre…