There’s something calming about being in Germany. People ride around on mechanical (not E-assisted) bikes. People pay for things in cash. An overwhelmingly common pastime is drinking beer beside the river like it’s 1984. A not-insignificant part of the population rebuilds cobblestone streets and sells white asparagus and strawberries on street corners. Aside from the smartphones that…
A few months back I wrote about joining Stainless . Today, Anthropic acquires Stainless . It’s pretty surreal. Last year I experienced the whirlwind process of having our small company (Crunchy) acquired by Snowflake. Visiting Berlin at the time the deal went through, I was told that waiting until I got back to the US would be too long, so I was to report immediately to Snowflake Berlin to…
A short one today, mainly just to share a link. I wrote my first longer-form essay in a while: The Second Wave of the API-first Economy . When I first got to Silicon Valley, we had a lot of fun with APIs. During my first year at Heroku I spent considerable time breaking an API out of our Rails web app (in retrospect, maybe not a strongly defensible use of effort), then revamping our API with a…
I’d intended for last week’s edition on LLMs to be largely a one off. It mostly will be, but I’ve had a few amusing conversations on the subject since. An insight from an old colleague: Mark’s Law: any proponent of AI labor replacement is replaceable by AI. Words to live by? One might even consider it a moral imperative to help AI labor replacement proponents out of their…
Where did January go? I can’t answer that question. I got mine going in Austin doing a colocated kickoff where we tried to get the basic shape of our new Stainless product in place. That was followed by a few days at Stainless West (San Francisco), and now I’m back in Seattle. Somewhere in that span, January disappeared. Product-wise, we got to a point where what we built is demo-able,…
Almost five years ago I wrote New Horizons as I left Stripe and went to work on databases at Crunchy. I can hardly believe it! Those years passed in the blink of an eye, eventually culminating with our acquisition by Snowflake last June. Welcome to Nanoglyph . Five years is a long time, and well, it happened again. Let me start by way of reminiscence. I know a guy (Alex) whom I worked with at…
Readers – So they do have Starlink here — a nice upgrade from the last time I was in this part of the globe. I’m always late to the game when it comes to these things, but it’s my “wow, this technology is amazing” phase right now. Located on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific and getting 50 mbps up / 9.25 mbps down. That’s as good as Comcast can…
Readers – It’s Christmas week for databases, with Postgres 18 released last Thursday . Postgres only ships new features once a year, so the annual major version cut is a time to stop, take note, and experiment a little. We usually wait for one minor release before upgrading production so that’ll be another month or two, but it’s something to start looking into.…
I’ve never written two issues of Nanoglyph so close together, but yesterday’s blast was running long, so I’m following it up with a brief point release. Last issue covered Rails World 2025 . Its closing party was at a museum in Amsterdam Noord called STRAAT . I knew there was a chance it’d be cool, but wasn’t prepared for what I got. The space is the size of an…
Readers – I recently attended the 2025 edition of Rails World in Amsterdam, my third year of the conference in a row. That sounds like a lot, but it’s the best event in technology, so I’ll keep going back as long as I can get tickets (it was very close this year). Like the inaugural Rails World in 2023, it was held in the gorgeous Beurs van Berlage, a stately building in central…
Readers — I’m just recently from a few weeks in Berlin. Going for a music festival, but taking the opportunity to stay a few extra weeks in one of my favorite cities. Before anything else, some usual housekeeping: I’m Brandur, and this is my newsletter Nanoglyph . It’s been comically delinquent bordering on absurdism, with this being the first issue in over a year. You may have…
Yesterday, we made Postgres 16 default for new clusters on Crunchy Bridge. Our loose policy is to wait for at least one minor version release for a new major, and with 16.1 cut last week , it was time (addressing three security vulnerabilities and some 55 bug fixes). In the spirit of dogfooding, I upgraded our production servers to Postgres 16 as well. Sometimes we upgrade to get access to a new…
Last week I traveled to Amsterdam for the first ever Rails World. It was a great event – well-organized, great location, and interesting, passionate people in every direction. In 2023, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the world’s moved on from Rails, but the framework’s done an admirable job of keeping itself current, despite the quantum leaps happening in JavaScript and…
Readers, it’s been a while. Again. I’ll give you my usual spiel after a long absence. This is Nanoglyph , a semi-delinquent newsletter about software whose original premise was to be weekly, but which in reality is more like a quarterly affair. If you don’t remember signing up for this, you probably did, but it was a long time ago. If you want to nope right the eff out, do me a…
Having never been before, the first thing that occurred to me arriving in London is that London is the most f*ing London place ever. Trite, yes, but what I mean is that the decades worth of London stereotypes in TV, movies, and photographs actually gave me a pretty good impression of what the city really would be like. All the features I’d come to expect were really there: stately mansions…
The middle days of Heroku were distinguished by two distinct ideological groups, cooperating to build and lay out the future for the platform, but also somewhat at odds with each other. Let’s call them “the Stables” and “the Philosophers”. As the name would suggest, the Stables were the more conservative of the two, having existing services to run, existing users to…
I’m back from Atlanta, and now in Paris. This was the first time I’d ever been to Atlanta, or anywhere in Georgia for that matter. Trying to pick a hotel, I pulled up Google Maps as I usually do to cross-reference the locations of hotels with those of parks and other areas of interest, only to find to my dismay that Atlanta appeared to have precious little in the way of either. A lot…
Subscribers – Welcome to the first new edition of Nanoglyph in a long time. In case you (correctly) have no idea what this is, I’m Brandur, and you may have subscribed to this list after reading Meta layoffs , Short, friendly base32 slugs from timestamps , or Soft deletion probably isn’t worth it , and thanks to my extreme sending delinquency, forgotten about it. As always, in…
By coincidence, two articles came out in quick succession which could turn out to be major landmarks for use of databases in the cloud: I’m all-in on Server-side SQLite : Litestream is a companion project to SQLite which intercepts its normal WAL process to continuously archive segments to a blob store like S3. In this post, its maintainer talks about joining Fly.io and why he’s…
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 . According to their latest update, an attacker gained access to Heroku’s main database (called core-db…