I’ve been somewhat tight-lipped about my job hunt, but not through any particular desire to obfuscate. No, I’ve just been laying low because I caught Covid right before Christmas and spent the last couple weeks recuperating. Just my luck, getting sick again so soon after whatever got me following Thanksgiving, and effectively missing the holidays as a consequence. Still, I had an informal offer before being incapacitated, so I only had to worry about recovering.

There’s a phrase that’s now become ubiquitous on various parts of the internet, and it goes like this:

The purpose of a system is what it does.

At first glance it’s a meaningless non sequitur, a sort of self-referencing zen koan seeking to make something simple seem profound. Obviously systems work as they’re designed, right? It’s tempting to discount it out of hand and move on. And yet, there’s a lot of linguistic trickery going on here that I want to unpack, and it carries far deeper implications than mere language.

Postgres Conference Seattle 2024 partnered up with PASS this year to present a united database front. They accepted my “Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star” talk, which I graciously gave on the last day of the conference. The next talk in that room wasn’t for another hour, so I had plenty of time to talk shop with attendees, about the future of Postgres, high availability, and Kubernetes in general.

If you weren’t there and missed out on the fun, this is your chance to catch up and enjoy a few of my notorious bad puns along the way. Let me tell you why the concept of Postgres HA is dead.

Postgres Conference Seattle 2024 partnered up with PASS this year to present a united database front. They accepted my “What’s our Vector, Victor?” talk, which I graciously gave on the first day of the conference. If you weren’t there and missed out on the fun, this is your chance to catch up and maybe get a bit more information that was cut for length. Let me tell you why RAG is the future, and how Postgres and pg_vectorize make it a reality.

About two months ago while browsing X, one of the people I follow posted a video recorded in 1985. It struck me in a way things of that era often do, and I sought a word that would adequately describe the feeling. I was only 8 when this video was recorded, but I still feel it down to my bones. I need a word that's a mix of melancholy, nostalgia, wistfulness, and poignancy, because it's all of those and more.