Databases have failed the web

The Rust programming language feels like a first generation product. You know what I mean. Like the first iPhone - which was amazing by the way. They made an entire operating system around multitouch. A smart phone with no keyboard. And a working web browser. Within a few months, we

A modest proposal Another week, another npm supply chain attack. Yikes! People on hacker news are wringing their hands about what should be done. The problem seems dire. Apparently I couldn't help myself. At 2am the other night I woke up, staring at the ceiling. I couldn't stop thinking about

A few years ago I was really bothered by an academic paper. Some researchers in France put together a comparison showing lots of ways you could implement concurrent editing, using various CRDT and OT algorithms. And they benchmarked all of them. (Wow, yess!) Some algorithms worked reasonably well. But others

I saw Martin Kleppmann’s talk a few weeks ago about his approach to realtime editing with CRDTs, and I felt a deep sense of despair. Maybe all the work I’ve been doing for the past decade won’t be part of the future after all, because Martin’s

We aren’t purely physical beings. Most of our day exists outside our body. Our minds slip out through our eyes, out into our screens. We become a different kind of organism, living in a weird symbiosis with reddit and whatsapp and gmail. When was the last time you noticed