Richard Crowley

@kneath This tweet has the same vibe as mcsweeneys.net/articles/volle….

I’m trying hard to keep this new phase of social media focused on building and where I see the world going. But you know, long ago I worked with a16z as they tried to help me “fix” GitHub’s growth in 2012. There’s something you should know about Marc. He’s a fucking talentless tool. Ben is the one with talent. Here’s an outhouse (the bonehouse) I built this summer. I made it out of trees we milled on site with the help of Pat. Pat is a great guy. Fuck Marc Andreessen.

@samlambert Absolutely just moused over the green gear to see the tooltip. :facepalm:

Scale from zero

If you can’t point ec2:TerminateInstances at one of your database servers, you don’t have a database.

@samlambert @Adeola13 And you can subscribe to Postgres logical replication from any PlanetScale database for ETL or really any other purpose you like.

@Adeola13 Clerk uses PlanetScale and I highly recommend them.

I am saying this from a purely technical perspective. If you are hosted on a platform that is doing so badly that they have to do this then you are hosted in the wrong place and should migrate.

@samlambert @jeffreyhuber "database." house shoes when?

@jeffreyhuber i would love to implement shoes off at the office but that ship has sailed.

shoes off culture is a red flag imo

@davidgomes @samlambert @RaoTwts PlanetScale Plug-The-Hard-Drive-Right-Into-The-Computer

@RaoTwts exactly

Completely missed the units of measurement the first time I saw this. Three orders of magnitude reduction in (average) query latency! Plugging the hard drive right into the motherboard is the “one weird trick” of databases.

@kwuchu Elastic Beanstalk is Surprisingly Fine™.

Thinking about where to deploy Oru. I know I'll be using PlanetScale for the database already (duh), but unsure about where I'll be hosting the Rails app. Requirements: - Free wildcard SSL support - Dynamic custom domain support - Good for hosting workers and the application server - GitHub syncing I thought about using Kamal but honestly, I just don't have it in me to manage it myself and the SSL stuff makes me think it'll be a headache, so idk.

@rbranson @JustJake Also piiiiiiiiiiiiiiing time.

@JustJake doesn’t space have non-trivial collision risk at sufficient density and satellite scale?

It very well might be easier to solve space cooling/energy problems than terrestrial/political problems Plan accordingly

Breaking: President Grant signs an executive order commanding you to get a whole bunch of IOPS for $50.

The new M-10 nodes are brutally fast for $50/m. They can hit between 10k and 14k IOPs:

@samlambert We don’t say “blip,” Sam.

I'm sick of Apple's software. It's humiliating to have a $4k laptop and hear my music blip just because I queued a song.

Plugging the hard drive directly into the server remains undefeated.

Syntax highlighting in Mergician rcrowley.org/mergician/synt…

@samlambert There's a bit in Cal's book that says, basically, scalability has nothing to do with performance except perhaps that it's cheaper/easier to scale a fast site.

It’s wild that “databases should be fast” has become a contrarian point of view.

@ianlivingstone But is slow.

I fundamentally believe this to be true - real time indexing and MVCC still is hard to build on top though - would love to see a framework come out that makes this accessible to everyone like RocksDB and SQLite have done in other scenarios.

My poor-man's monorepo: rcrowley.org/2025/monorepo/

@ryan_t_brown @tinybird @PlanetScale @TimescaleDB That's fair feedback and we're making it much more explicit as I type.

@rcrowley @tinybird @PlanetScale @TimescaleDB I get that now, just wish it was clear in the documentation - caggs are the main feature. I saw the announcement, got excited and moved on it - should have done more due diligence.

Just spent a week planning the migration from @tinybird to our existing @PlanetScale with @TimescaleDB only to realize the supported version doesn't have continuous aggregates or compression/retention policies. What a fucking joke

@BenjDicken The Part-Time Parliament

What are your favorite technical papers? I want to do some livestreams going over papers as a group. Much like my grad-school days of sitting in a classroom and discussing design tradeoffs of popular tech literature.