PlanetScale Metal By Richard Crowley 2025 -03-11 and 2025 -12-15 Exactly one week after I began working at PlanetScale, I pitched the CEO on what he’d soon name PlanetScale Metal . The pitch was simple: What if we ran Vitess the way I ran it at Slack, with fast, local SSD storage, instead of the slow way, using EBS? That pitch bought me the space to develop a prototype and some spreadsheets…
Syntax highlighting By Richard Crowley 2025 -12-05 Last week I posted possibly the longest code block I ever have and, even though the rest of the site is black and white with browser-standard blue and purple links, it looked stupid without syntax highlighting. Not so stupid that I was willing to involve JavaScript , mind you. Enter GNU Source-highlight . In addition to not being a client-side…
Monorepo By Richard Crowley 2025 -11-30 I like the idea of monorepos. Perhaps it’s the allure of mystery; I’ve never worked anywhere that has one. Sure, I’ve worked at companies with few source code repositories and companies with big and busy source code repositories but never any company that had literally one monolithic source code repository. I’m fascinated by Piper and the lore surrounding…
Everything is lock-in By Richard Crowley 2025 -11-17 I see you out there, thinking that by limiting yourself to just EC2 and S3 you’re avoiding vendor lock-in. You imagine the day you tell AWS to jump in a lake and migrate painlessly to GCP. I’ve got news for you. Everything is lock-in. EC2 is lock-in. S3 is lock-in. GCP products are lock-in, too. Everything is lock-in. Lock-in is not a binary…
The hard way By Richard Crowley 2025 -11-16 I am slow to adopt new high-level abstractions, take on dependencies, and generally trade depth of understanding for speed of delivery. I like doing things hard way. Not all the time, of course — at work, time to market matters — but sometimes and especially when it comes to personal projects and my programming environment. I do things the hard way for…
The future I want for AWS By Richard Crowley 2025 -06-09 AWS is a juggernaut. Individual business units are larger than some entire industries. The scale of their infrastructure defies comprehension. And yet there’s chatter about AWS being on the decline. “Washed,” they say. I’d expect this from the VC set, eagle eyes trained on the would-be disruptors. But dozens of casual conversations with…
These cobbler’s children have excellent shoes By Richard Crowley 2025 -02-06 I’ve worked on an enormous variety of software in my life – web, desktop, firmware, client, server – but I’ve written and rewritten my personal web content management system more times than anything else, and it’s not even close. I can think of seven complete rewrites, plus a dark age involving Wordpress. It’s been a…
AWS IAM Identity Center By Richard Crowley 2025 -01-02 Substrate was inspired by an ambitious AWS network architectural migration the Melbourne-based Cloud Engineering team at Slack took on circa 2018, which they inexplicably called Project White Castle. The high points of that project were lots of AWS accounts, shared VPCs, private subnets, HTTP proxies for outbound Internet access, and…
Responsible dissolution By Richard Crowley 2024 -12-05 Going out of business (an overly dramatic way to say it — sorrynotsorry) is a lot of work. On top of the careful work we did to prop open doors for customers who wanted to migrate to still-irrigated pastures and relicensing as open-source so a consortium of former customers can share maintenance, we had an actual company to unwind. Source &…
Homelab By Richard Crowley 2024 -11-18 I bought a bag of Raspberry Pi boards when the Raspberry Pi 5 came out and I’m itching to do something with them. In lieu of knowing what something is, let’s PXEboot them. I’ve got a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board for my PXEboot server, three Raspberry Pi 5 boards for my homelab servers, a clicky-clacky keyboard, a Radio Shack worth of cables, dongles, and power…