Diwali A personal reflection on Diwali. The festival of lights, the world I grew up in, and choosing light in darker times.

"So this Diwali, a small reminder to myself, and maybe to you. Light the lamp. Not just in your home, but between people. In conversation, in community, in the spaces where it’s hardest to do so. Choose warmth over heat. Choose curiosity over certainty.."

www.shayon.dev/post/2025/30...

An MVCC-like columnar table on S3 with constant-time deletes A thought experiment in building Parquet-like columnar table on S3 with row-level deletes using conditional writes, tombstone files, and a single-object transaction pointer.

For funsies

www.shayon.dev/post/2025/27...

⚖️

Bypass PostgreSQL catalog overhead with direct partition hash calculations Eliminating PostgreSQL catalog traversal overhead with local partition calculations for up to 20x faster hash partition queries.

Bypass PostgreSQL catalog overhead with direct partition hash calculations

www.shayon.dev/post/2025/22...

Oh! Thanks dude!! Hope alls well ❤️

This is what progress looks like

Is AGI paradoxical? If AI learns from human intelligence, can it ever truly transcend its origins? Is AGI a technical milestone or philosophical mirage?

"The paradox of artificial general intelligence might be that the more we chase it, the more we appreciate what we already have: human intelligence, in all its messy, creative, contextual glory. And perhaps...."

www.shayon.dev/post/2025/17...

Good morning HN!

Pitfalls of premature closure with LLM assisted coding When LLM models generates clean, professional-looking code, it's tempting to stop exploring alternatives. But therein lies the risks that comes with premature closure. So what is premature closure?

Fresh off the press - some raw thoughts on "Premature Closure" in the world of AI.

www.shayon.dev/post/2025/16...

How our engineering team improves the on-call experience with Tines | Tines At Tines, we have two types of on-call: daytime and out-of-hours. In this blog, we explain the daytime on-call shift, its pros and cons, and how we make it easier by using Tines.

Engineering teams know all too well how hard on-call can be. At @tineseng.bsky.social , one tool is critical to how we make it easier: Tines.

Izabela from our team shares how we do it:
www.tines.com/blog/tines-a...

As much as I love shipping features, systems and performance wins just hit different! 🚀

Finding about PostgreSQL vacuums, heap truncation and standbys the hard way 🙃

github.com/postgres/pos...

A PostgreSQL planner gotcha with CTEs DELETE and LIMIT How a seemingly straightforward DELETE query using a CTE and LIMIT returned more rows than expected due to query planner optimization.

This was a fun one

www.shayon.dev/post/2025/11...

github.com/shayonj/pg_h...

Usually moving to partitioned tables come with a cost.
Turns out calculating which partitioned table you can send your pointed queries (without querying database) makes those queries _extremely_ fast. More to come soon.

Reverse engineering PostgreSQL's hashfn.c (github.com/postgres/pos...) in Ruby to speed up point queries on partitioned tables (as one does 😂)

Protocol, query planning, MVCC related things are always fun to learn and get deeper insight in.

$0.02c (not sure if that helps 😅)

Choose Boring Technology How to be old, for young people.

I have some thoughts about boringtechnology.club for you, as the work turns ten years old this weekend.

Selective asynchronous commits in PostgreSQL - balancing durability and performance Safely leverage PostgreSQL's asynchronous commit for significant performance gains

Great article from @shayonj.bsky.social about async vs. sync commit in Postgres. I've talked about this with folks for year that it's not all or nothing you can toggle per session/transaction/etc. Though can't recall many folks writing it up, so thanks! www.shayon.dev/post/2025/75...

Selective asynchronous commits in PostgreSQL - balancing durability and performance Safely leverage PostgreSQL's asynchronous commit for significant performance gains

Wrote a bit about an interesting find lately www.shayon.dev/post/2025/75...

Thank you! I figured. I am experimenting with a few things, will write more depending on how it pans out.

Thanks for taking a look

@michristofides.com I'd be curious to get your & Nikolay's take on this. I tried looking up an episode on the podcast also but didn't find any.

The perf gains from turning it off is pretty significant :D

Are folks running PostgreSQL DBs with synchronous_commit on or off? 🌶️

Challenging AI generated code from first principles While these tools boost productivity, they're not a replacement for critical thinking. Taking the time to understand why something works (or breaks) and building strong mental models isn't just busy w...

"While these tools boost productivity, they’re not a replacement for critical thinking. Taking the time to understand why something works (or breaks) and building strong mental models isn’t just busy work..."

www.shayon.dev/post/2025/53...

Scaling with PostgreSQL without boiling the ocean Practical scaling strategies for application developers who don't have a dedicated database team

Some more ramblings from working on PostgreSQL

(Had its brief moment on HN)

www.shayon.dev/post/2025/40...

Counting is a hard problem.

Appreciate that! Looking forward to some of the more native PostgreSQL features that would feel compatible from an application dev POV.

Triggers, Serial, FK, JSON(B), Sequence and more.

Planning a wedding with your parents is a group project that no one prepared you for.

Post run, half baked thought:

In memory store, flush to S3 every N interval. Reader replicas straight from S3 (?) New S3 primitives (conditional writes, and append only) for strong consistency and other good semantics.

Costs ? Unknown 💸

Very cool! Congrats on the rollout