I started a software research company

notes.eatonphil.com/2026-02-25-i...

"Bad thing existed before I made it easier to do bad thing" isn't the argument you think it is.

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

If you've run seaweedfs, versity, juicefs, beegfs, or rustfs—permissively-licensed s3-compatible storage systems— and are open to chatting about your experience, I'd like to chat with you for The Consensus.

Hiring in the US 🇺🇸

If you are into #DistributedSystems, #Databases, #Kubernetes, then I'm hiring for #ClickHouse Cloud AutoScaling Team!

Things we do:
📊 Scaling Algorithms, 🚀 Performance, ⚙️ Reliability

👥Staff / Principals (open to Seniors)

DM or Reply here!

Hiring in the US 🇺🇸

If you are into #DistributedSystems, #Databases, #Kubernetes, then I'm hiring for #ClickHouse Cloud AutoScaling Team!

Things we do:
📊 Scaling Algorithms, 🚀 Performance, ⚙️ Reliability

👥Staff / Principals (open to Seniors)

DM or Reply here!

LLMs might teach us something about discourse. Imagine if it was socially acceptable within an argument or discussion to pause and say "Thinking longer for a better answer"

GitHub - facebookincubator/nimble: New file format for storage of large columnar datasets. New file format for storage of large columnar datasets. - facebookincubator/nimble

There was collaboration attempt between CMU, Tsinghua, Meta, CWI, Nvidia, Voltron, & SpiralDB. But then lawyers got involved and it fell apart. Everyone released their own format:
→ Meta Nimble: github.com/facebookincu...
→ CWI FastLanes: github.com/cwida/FastLa...
→ SpiralDB Vortex: vortex.dev

Is anyone working on a K8s alternative? Kinda curious.

So if you have the depth + breadth, DM me.

But that's just an example.

The pattern I've usually seen is that DB developers can have *depth* in one area of expertise (think Storage, Query Processing, Consensus etc).

But for building a prod DB offering, depth isn't enough. You need significant breadth.

Of course, they might know a lot about Cloud Infrastructure -> all the way from AWS primitives down to what the hardware can support.

Then there are outstanding applications - people who've got both the breadth and the depth.

They can:

Start from a log line ->
Think about DB operations in K8s ->
Reason the Kernel's allocation behavior ->
Impact on the DB's own memory allocation ->
Find a fix.

Can't hire a pure Infra person who cannot write code.

Can't hire a pure backend person who doesn't do infra - because usually there is a separate team to manage it for them.

Also can't hire a SQL expert who opens Snowflake and writes queries all day.

Overlap in ^ puts you ahead of the curve

If you're primarily a DevOps Engineer or an SRE, for many CVs, I don't even know if this person can code or not.
Usually, there is nothing in the CV that indicates application / backend development skills.

So can you build production grade systems?

Conversely, if you're a k8s expert, but know nothing about the nuances of what it takes to manage databases, you will have an interesting learning curve ahead.

k8s itself is a vast ecosystem though, so the ability to deep dive into k8s control loops puts you ahead of the curve.

3. Operationally, DBAs != Cloud Native Database Infra Devs. If you are used to database tuning to support production workloads in a few companies, you're off to a great start.

But can I trust you to build similar things on top of k8s?

2. User != Operator != Developer, but the lines do get blurred.

The best DB developer I know is also the best user of said DB.

Operators don't have to be expert devs, but must be willing to get their hands dirty.

Since I spent the entire first half of the day going over at least a 150+ CVs, I'll just mention a few Dos and Don't.

These aren't cardinal rules (I also make mistakes). But here we go:

1. Proof of work. Done similar work? I'll likely trust you to ramp up quickly

This is still a thing. I'm hiring 2 engineers. DM me or Email your CV at manish.gill [at] clickhouse [dot] com.

Dancing With the Pods: Live Migration of a Database Fleet While Serving... Jayme Bird & Manish Gill YouTube video by CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]

My London #KubeCon / #CloudNativeCon 2025 talk is now up! Check it out here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufY_...

Are there Senior/Staff+ Engineers on my timeline who want to work on the intersection of #Databases, #Caches, #Infra, Kubernetes/Operators and #Scaling #Algorithms (think time series, predictive scaling etc)?

If so, please drop me a DM. Our small but mighty team at ClickHouse is growing!

In #London this week to attend KubeCon. My colleague Jayme Bird and I will be doing a talk about a year long dtatefulset orchestration migration in ClickHouse cloud.

Do attend the talk if you are interested in operators, durable execution or databases.

#KubeCon #CloudNativeCon #Kubecon2025

Congrats!

Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability need to be resolved. In addition, there...

Chapters 1–7 of the second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications are now available in early release (sorry, O'Reilly subscribers only at this point). Among other changes, you may notice that we now talk about “sharding” rather than “partitioning” www.oreilly.com/library/view...

Learning German is more difficult than learning C++.

www.foundationdb.org/files/fdb-pa...

Reading the FoundationDB Paper today at the work #papers group. Such a great read.

Whoever said Go is a minimal language is a liar.

First NYC Systems talks of 2025 tonight! See you there!