A curated collection of articles, videos, and posts I find interesting - let me know what you think and if you have any other articles that are interesting.

25 Mar 2026 Thoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down Mario Zechner I don't necessarily agree with the extreme position here, but it does make some points. And... it's funny :-)

24 Mar 2026 TurboQuant: Redefining AI Efficiency with Extreme Compression Google Research If inference gets 10x cheaper in memory, does the entire money-house-of-cards fall apart? Maybe we don't have to bankrupt the planet (i.e. the Matrix)

Mar 2026 Dylan Patel — The Single Biggest Bottleneck to Scaling AI Compute Dwarkesh Patel This house-of-cards of AI power consumption will fall. Bet against it. The silliness of this hype is unfathomable.

11 Feb 2026 No Coding Before 10am Michael Bloch / Substack For any of you who've read "The Phoenix Project", you remember that Brett was the problem. Brett is no longer the problem. Deep meaningful thought about customers is now the limiting factor.

Feb 2026 Neural Networks — The Basics and the Math Behind How They Learn 3Blue1Brown 3B1B is always awesome. Watch it. IMO, Neural networks as currently implemented represent the amoeba. Imagine what AI will be like when neural networks (including LLMs) have the diversity of neuronal capabilities and power that the human brain has.

Dec 2025 Why LinkedIn Is Replacing PMs with AI-Powered "Full-Stack Builders" Lenny Rachitsky / Lenny's Podcast My whole career, I've watched engineers pigeon-hole themselves into being water carriers for their PMs. This was always silly. Now it's unviable. EVERYBODY needs to have customer delight at the center of their cognitive decision matrix.

Dec 2025 There Is Something Faster Than Light Veritasium Ok, this is completely off topic for my website. But enjoy it anyways!

11 Oct 2025 The Circular AI Money Shell Game Ryan Levesque / The Digital Contrarian Ponzi schemes always end up failing. And the billionaires will act surprised as all the people they lied to lose their money. There is a rea$on that all these people are giggling behind their hands as they lie to the rest of us.

Jun 2025 CTO Confessions — What I Got Right (and Wrong) About Team Building Techsylvania 2025, Cluj, Romania Now, more than ever, building a great team is important. How can we move fast without trust? We can't tolerate bad behavior anymore. Darwinism will take on a new meaning - and it's a good thing. No more smart jerks.

Feb 2024 Is the "Modern Data Stack" Still a Useful Idea? The Analytics Engineering Roundup Tristan talks about how his initially groundbreaking idea is now changing. Sadly, despite the brilliance of Tristan, the success of dbt Labs, and a decade of work, data work still remains a hack at most companies.

Feb 2024 dbt Labs Names Data Industry Veteran Mark Porter as Chief Technology Officer dbt Labs Blog I was delighted to join dbt Labs, working for Tristan Handy and working with such amazing people as Sarah Riley, Ryan Segar, Brandon Sweeney, and (most of all) Meg Pittman. So very much work accomplished over two years to basically rework every layer of the software, operational, and human stack in Engineering at dbt Labs. An amazing experience I will always be thankful for.

Jun 2023 Mark Porter - MongoDB .local NYC 2023 MongoDB .Local NYC 2023 MongoDB had the bravery to challenge 30 years of relational inertia. The data model, the deployment model, and MongoDB Atlas remain amazing. Can MongoDB succeed? Only time will tell.

Jun 2023 Bits to Bytes: Forging a Successful Career in Tech Techsylvania 2023, Cluj, Romania Your career is yours to manage. Just yours. Leah Melvoin was legendary about how she taught this at Amazon. I try to put together the key points of how to manage your career to be as successful as possible.

Jun 2022 A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence Yann LeCun / OpenReview My non-PhD intuition says he's right. Totally right. LLMs in their current (2026) form are a global max for conversations with humans, but a local max for actual useful intelligence and insight. I'm betting on the energy and self-training model.

Jun 2022 From Started-up To Scaled-up Techsylvania 2022, Cluj, Romania Culture is the (un)written and (un)spoken set of rules of the bargain you make about how you will behave in return for others making the same promise. Too bad that most companies use culture to trap you into behaving well while letting execs and smart jerks off the hook.

Jun 2022 We Went To MongoDB World 2022 So You Didn't Have To! See What You Missed! Linode When I went to MongoDB, I focused on getting the tech-focused team to being customer focused. 2022 was the first public release of a lot of what I accomplished. It was a start. Jim Sharf (MongoDB CTO) is focusing on what needs to be focused on - mission-critical performance, efficiency, availability, and operability. Will it be enough for MongoDB to succeed when the vast majority of agents suggest Supabase rather than MongoDB Atlas? (which is a shame)

Jun 2022 MongoDB's New Tool to Migrate Data from Relational Systems The New Stack Strict relational is great. MongoDB documents are great. I hit a huge amount of organizational resistance to building and releasing this tool - I still can't figure out why. This tool was built to help people have choices.

Jul 2021 MongoDB 5.0: Worth the Wait Database Trends and Applications This was my first release as MongoDB CTO. It was a start...

Jul 2021 The Difference Between R and D MongoDB Blog Michael Cahill's piece on what's next at MongoDB

May 2021 One of Dwight's first slide presentations on MongoDB, 2009 myNoSQL Dwight and Eliot changed the world.

Feb 2021 Your Company Is Too Risk-Averse Harvard Business Review When I wrote this, I wondered if this was MongoDB or not. To this day, I don't know. But the fact that MongoDB, which is a fabulous product, is still at less than 10% market share, tells me we needed to accept more risk and take more chances.

Feb 2021 Cracking the Code of Sustained Collaboration Harvard Business Review "Teach People to Listen, Not Talk" - Communicating is really hard. I'm working on this too. Stop deluding yourself that it's the tech that makes producing great products hard. It's the people.

Feb 2021 How Andy Jassy Was Trained by Jeff Bezos CNBC One way to build leaders — how Amazon does it

Feb 2021 Things David Perell Learned from Jeff Bezos David Perell Key things to learn about how Bezos runs Amazon

Feb 2021 Andy Jassy's 8 Steps to Reinvent a Business SiliconANGLE How companies can reinvent themselves

Feb 2021 Connect Then Lead Harvard Business Review This is a top re-read for me. Once a quarter. People above you in the org chart expect competence first and then warmth second (though some toxic cultures don't care at all). People below you expect warmth first, that you care about them, and then competence second. This tightrope is crazy hard.

Jan 2021 Secure Multiparty Computation Communications of the ACM Tarik and Seny (if you know who I mean, good for you), are absolutely brilliant. I learned so much from them, and I think I only learned maybe 15% of what they know. Queryable Encryption (which they invented and we hold co-patents on) easily wins as the most important innovation that never took over the world that I've been part of.

Jan 2021 Stepping Up for a Truly Open Source Elasticsearch AWS Open Source Blog Quite an interesting way to wake up the open source community. Watching Amazon navigate their increased commitment to open source over the last 5 years has been a pleasure.

Jan 2021 Elastic License v2 Elastic Blog Watching Shay navigate his "Not OK" drama with Amazon was...stressful. While I think it ended well, including the current Elastic License being a work of art, the market went through needless stress.

Nov 2020 The Feedback Fallacy Harvard Business Review "The first problem with feedback is that humans are unreliable raters of other humans." So sadly true. "Focusing People on their shortcomings doesn't enable learning; it impairs it" - Taytay got this right in her song 'Mean'. Your job as a leader is to explain what excellence looks like. And give agency to your employees to aspire to that, to achieve it; or to move on.

Oct 2020 High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety Harvard Business Review Can we feel safe in a high performing team?

Oct 2020 Hanlon's Razor Farnam Street Maybe they aren't all out to get you?

Sep 2020 The Authenticity Paradox Harvard Business Review It truly is a paradox. When people ask you to be authentic, they are really asking you to be exactly what they want. When you show up as yourself, with all your strengths and flaws equally exposed, you get skewered by most c-levels, especially founders, who have more blindness in this area than the rest of us. So... figure out your authentic self. Figure out what the company needs. And slowly, while keeping your job, make them the same thing.

Aug 2020 The Essential Clayton Christensen Articles Harvard Business Review Clay Christensen was a gift and I continue to be sad he is no longer with us

Jul 2020 The Principle of Charity Effectiviology A piece on what it means to believe in best intentions

Jul 2020 The Seven Transformations of Leadership Harvard Business Review I personally find my Diplomat very challenged

Jul 2020 Steve Yegge's Medium Page Medium One of the funniest blogs on the Internet

12 Jun 2017 Attention is all you need Arxiv The paper that started a very important discussion

Jun 1994 Oracle media server: providing consumer based interactive access to multimedia data SIGMOD Record The paper that defined truly scalable media servers - well before it's time