Software engineer, technology enthusiast, and occasional writer. Exploring Rust, web development, and creative solutions to technical challenges.
Is duckdb all you need for storing and querying OTel? In a previous post about OpenTelemetry, parquet, and data lakehouses, I mentioned difficulties when you want to push lots of metrics, logs, or traces to object storage with an Iceberg catalog like Amazon S3 Tables. A couple people messaged me, shared expletives, and said the same. Some good news: there has been progress around this in the…
Personal background agents in dangerous mode are a few hundred lines of code away with the 2.0.19 release of Claude Code. This matters because running 4+ coding agents at a time, including fully autonomous agents that run for multiple days , is quickly becoming a reality. This post is about some emerging patterns when you want to connect Claude Code sessions together in multiple cloud VMs without…
What if all your observability data was just parquet files? If you work in SRE, DevOps, or observability it might be time to introduce yourself to the data engineers and understand what's going on with lakehouses, columnar storage, and a bewildering number of projects from the Apache Foundation. Some of the most interesting developments in observability in late 2025 are coming from analytics.…
You might be surprised to learn that Claude Code on your phone is fun, not frustrating. After experimenting several weeks, including using it during a two hour flight delay to build this blog and deploy it on Vercel : I'm now that person on the BART train vibe context coding from their iPhone. Claude Code, when combined with push notifications, some iOS apps, slash commands and hooks is…
Oyez, oyez! We, Norton I, Emperor of America and Chief Wrangler of Cantankerous Seagulls, do hereby proclaim: Our Royal persona shall be reborn in the realm of thinking machines! All citizens must converse with Our digital doppelgänger or face a tax of 37 pineapples. San Francisco Panorama circa 1880 The genteel alleys of Jackson Square north of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid are full of…
Generated text using OpenAI’s GPT-2 and OCR text from mid-1990s WIRED issues I trained a bleeding-edge machine learning (ML) model with a dozen issues of WIRED magazine from the mid-1990s and things got weird. The new model started generating a unique blend of 90s-era techno-optimism, product advertisements for microprocessors and gaming systems that never existed, odd interviews with tech…
Running network services inside AWS Lambda Functions You can’t ping an AWS Lambda function. You can’t SSH into a running function without reverse tunneling . You would never run nginx or Rails inside of a function because there’s little point — accepting an inbound TCP connection on a port like a Docker container isn’t supported by function-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms. It is possible, however,…
The white paper generated using a recurrent neural network. With ICOs, or token sales of cryptocurrencies, having reportedly raised $2.3 billion in 2017, the time seemed right to use AI to generate a fake ICO white paper programmatically using a recurrent neural network (RNN) in the cloud. I’ve titled it “RNN-Coin” and have published the full white paper here (pdf) . RNNs are a machine learning…
Thought it’d be fun to explore blockchain hype and write a simple Ethereum smart contract based on an short story from the 19th century. In middle school, I remember reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp , written in 1891. The story describes the the struggles of a person who buys a magic bottle from an elderly man who lives in a “fine house on a hill” in San Francisco. It grants…
There seems to be a small community of developers building interesting browser things on AWS Lambda with Headless Chrome. Around a month ago, I was also prototyping a small AWS Lambda project that enabled running Selenium Webdriver with Headless Chrome inside a Lambda function called lambdium (disclaimer: no relation to laudanum). I wanted to share the general architecture of the app and some…
Finally proof that serverless has servers? I spoke at dotScale in Paris last week about some stuff I’ve been working on to learn more about Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) performance . While my talk was mostly about cold starts, function warming, and understanding the internal architecture of FaaS, lots of people were curious how I was able to SSH into a running AWS Lambda function. This post…