Viewing profile — nickvanw

Hi! I'm the CTO of PlanetScale - the PostgreSQL offering we launched today is built on top of pure Postgres and doesn't come with any limitations. The future sharded version will a…

Our experience has been that they do fire, but not reliably enough or soon enough to be worth anything other than validating the problem after the fact.

Author here - it's not that we're detecting failure better than they are (though certainly, we might be able to do it as fast as anyone else) - it's what you do afterwards that mat…

Answering on behalf of PlanetScale (I'm the CTO!). I don't remember exactly what was different from upstream, but it wasn't a whole lot of changes. Fortunately, PlanetScale runs a …

This is the un-fun work needed to get open source software into many different parts of the enterprise and government. It's not fun, and sometimes it's not even very difficult, but…

I'm pretty happy about this, I don't think Apple should be forced to open up iMessage, but not adopting the RCS standard always seemed a bit underhanded to me. Even if it sucks, be…

What monopoly? Android has a larger market share than Apple by quite a large factor in the European Union. Saying that Apple does not provide value is laughable - saying that it is…

This is useful - using an exit node with an Apple TV is useful as well for navigating around certain tools that are geo-blocked. Before, you'd have to handle it outside of the devi…

Here in the PNW there is basically one corridor that would make sense as a semi-high speed (160+ kph) rail, which is Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. They are all under 200 miles from e…

I'm in Seattle, my new-ish townhouse has a heat pump and it's never been too cold for it to be functional - it's worked hard some of the really cold+snowy days the last few years, …

I don't even have a dipstick in my car at this point - the computer will warn you when the oil level is low, otherwise you're to assume it's fine. It also warns me when the windshi…

I'll take SSDs over hard drives spinning up, and the rest of it is pretty much a clear improvement over what existed before. The fact that my M1 MBP doesn't usually spin up any fan…

They do generally receive favorable marks by the IIHS: https://jalopnik.com/volvo-is-the-first-carmaker-to-receive-... . Even updated tests (released post-launch of the car) tend t…

I have my issues with what 1Password has become as a product, but this seems like a very good stance to take. As a product owner, it's essential to know what and how people are usi…

Asking ChatGPT "Why does the price of a Credit Default Swap rise?" gets you: > The price of a Credit Default Swap (CDS) rises when the market perceives an increased risk of default…

SVB shares are worth $0 because there was a run on the bank and the US Government did not step in to save the bank, only the depositors. If the same thing happens to other banks - …

Well, in my opinion, it remains to be seen whether big tech compensation for this style of work is sustainable long-term. Of course, if you're already pulling 800k/y in TC at Googl…

I would put it even more simply: just knowing Engineering isn't enough if you want to excel past a certain point, unless you're going to go extremely deep and become a subject matt…

This appears to throw a 404 for me.

> It is worth noting that the USB-C interface currently used by Apple in the 10th-generation iPad, iPad mini, iPad Air, and iPad Pro, do not contain an IC chip for authentication, …

I've never worked at AWS, but I have worked on smaller systems where people depended on defaults. Speaking first hand, it is EXTREMELY difficult to get changes to defaults shipped …

Hi! I'm the VP of Engineering at PlanetScale and was at the company when we made this decision. We had the advantage of being able to decide to do this up front when we were first …

Oil is significantly more valuable than water - the added cost per gallon of water would be astronomical. 1 oil barrel is 42 gallons and costs around $75 today. I pay about $6 per …