List of resources (any medium) that caught my attention this year (2025 edition). If curious check also:

1. Jan-2025

1.1. Databases in 2024: A Year in Review // Blog // Andy Pavlo - Carnegie Mellon University

1.2. Ask HN: Programmers who don’t use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42492508 Interesting debate on VIM vs IDE. I write Bash in Vim and Python in IDE (VSCode + iPython) and although enamoured by David Baeyzley’s mastery, the IDE’s just where I’m at with that particular language. To each his own, I think for this.

1.3. Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf]

1.4. Bird (2024)

1.5. Null device - Wikipedia

1.6. Say NO to Venn Diagrams When Explaining JOINs – Java, SQL and jOOQ.

1.7. Hotel California - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

1.8. Remembering Mike Maples, Sr.

1.9. Why Greenland Is Of Growing Strategic Significance

1.10. Jerry Seinfeld, Ichiro Suzuki and the Pursuit of Mastery

  • https://www.readtrung.com/p/jerry-seinfeld-ichiro-suzuki-and Anyone Can Pursue Mastery Mastery is Plateaus and Brief Spurts of Progress Mastery is a Lifelong Journey The Importance of a Child’s Mindset Mastery & Muscle Memory The Zen Buddhism Connection 4 Traits Shared By Practitioners of Mastery Seinfeld and Ichiro Suzuki

1.11. AI’s Uneven Arrival – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

  • https://stratechery.com/2025/ais-uneven-arrival/ An eye-opener for o3. This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models. For context, ARC-AGI-1 took 4 years to go from 0% with GPT-3 in 2020 to 5% in 2024 with GPT-4o. All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated for o3, which performs at 75% for ths test.

1.12. The Origins of Wokeness

  • https://paulgraham.com/woke.html We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we’d previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they’re wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop saying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on them. In liberal democracies, people trying to prevent something from being said will usually claim they’re not merely engaging in censorship, but trying to prevent some form of “harm”. And maybe they’re right. But once again, the burden of proof is on them. It’s not enough to claim harm; they have to prove it.

1.13. Heroku and the Twelve-Factor App with Vish Abrams - Software Engineering Daily

1.14. Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi

1.15. Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams

1.16. The quiet rebellion of a little life

  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42769751 Near as I can tell there is a not-insignificant part of the American psychological context that amounts to a threat of utter destitution should you not choose to keep slaving away. By Krom, America needs homeless people to show you just how far you can fall unless you keep serving the man.

1.17. AI Slop, Suspicion, and Writing Back

1.18. From open source to acquired with Ashley Jeffs (Changelog Interviews #625)

  • https://changelog.com/podcast/625 On Benthos Stream Processing, from OS to being bought by Red Panda. Very funny at times, the humor there seemed like instilled in Benthos itself.

1.19. Jinja (template engine) - Wikipedia

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinja_(template_engine) Using Jinja for a simpler task as it was a first thing that occured to me. I should have just used a built-in Template module though. I did not need any programming logic in the template just a simple placeholders.

1.20. Good Lord - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

1.21. Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between AI and human intelligence

2. Feb-2025

2.1. Don’t Believe Him (by Ezra)

2.2. Introducing self-describing JSONs

2.3. 49 Small Truths About Marriage All Couples Understand - Fatherly

2.4. Turso is rewriting SQLite in Rust with Glauber Costa, CEO at Turso (Changelog Interviews #626)

2.5. Beej’s Guide to Network Programming

2.6. Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Marginal REVOLUTION

2.7. Fallthrough & Friends with Matthew Sanabria & Kris Brandow (Changelog & Friends #77)

  • https://changelog.com/friends/77 On documentation: what’s often missing is I think my biggest gripe right now is just how few docs we have, how little documentation so many things have. But if there was a way… I think there was especially – what was it? There was one that was like the discover and learn steps. I am very frustrated often at libraries that I want to go in and understand, and there’s no “Oh, start looking here.” Or like “Here’s the basic architecture that you can then use to understand how this codebase is laid out, so you can go read the code and understand how we’ve implemented all of these things.” That documentation is almost always completely missing.

2.8. QuadrupleA/sqlite-page-explorer: Visual tool to explore SQLite databases page-by-page, the way they’re stored on disk and the way SQLite sees them.

Normally developers interact with databases on the “schema level” - tables, rows, and SQL. But taking a peek at the “page level” can give you some interesting insights:

2.9. Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS

2.10. Marshmallow Test and Parenting - @desunit (Sergey Bogdanov)

2.11. Comments - Tech’s Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything

2.12. Let Brandon Cook - Cal Newport

2.13. Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

2.14. Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?

2.15. Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)

2.16. What is the difference between len() and sys.getsizeof() methods in python? - Stack Overflow

2.17. Filtered Decks - Anki Manual

2.18. htop Explained Visually

2.19. PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE

  • https://www.pbs.org/johngardner/sections/writings_speech_1.html The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.

You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.

2.20. Intro To ‘comm’ Command In Linux

2.21. Pravidla Magic: The Gathering ( ▷ Videonávod)

2.22. The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours

2.23. Discovering discovery coding with Jimmy Miller (Changelog & Friends #80)

2.24. Future of AI: what happens after DeepSeek? (No One knows - but I have a guess) - YouTube

2.25. Achievement, here and there - by Benn Stancil

2.26. Discovering discovery coding with Jimmy Miller (Changelog & Friends #80)

2.27. Vim After Bram: A Core Maintainer on How They’ve Kept It Going - The New Stack

2.28. SED1260 - Robert Hodges

2.29. Understanding Golang’s lightweight concurrency model

2.30. Understanding Golang’s lightweight concurrency model

2.31. yq

2.32. Discovering discovery coding with Jimmy Miller (Changelog & Friends #80)

  • https://changelog.com/friends/80#transcript But I think the key to get into discovery coding is to be willing to not have a solution in mind. I do think that that is easier said than done. I think it’s very, very tempting anytime you’re approaching programming problems to come with solutions. And I don’t know, it sounds almost silly when I say it, but I’ve found that to be the number one thing that stops me from finding the good solutions, is that I already have a solution in mind, even if it’s just in the back of my head, and as I’m going and doing this, I will just automatically go towards that solution.

So step one, clear your mind, meditate… No solutions. Step two I really think is ask questions. Ask questions about the codebase, about the problem, about whatever it is that is this situation you’re in, and try to find the answers for those. And if the answers are frustrating to find, if it just takes too long to find them, build a tool that makes it really easy. And if you start there, the process of discovery coding will start becoming the easy default, because every time you want to have an answer, you already have tools available to you to help find that answer, and that ends up being like your inspiration for how to continue.

So the goal is to try to make it easy to discovery-code, because if it’s not, you’re never gonna do it. So you kind of have to do the hard work up front.

2.33. Jr Devs - I Can’t Code Anymore

2.34. Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

2.35. Europe faces its fate as an American colony - New Statesman

2.36. DOC • Beautiful, boring, and without soul

2.37. Discovering discovery coding with Jimmy Miller (Changelog & Friends #80)

  • https://changelog.com/friends/80 the key to get into discovery coding is to be willing to not have a solution in mind. I do think that that is easier said than done. I think it’s very, very tempting anytime you’re approaching programming problems to come with solutions. And I don’t know, it sounds almost silly when I say it, but I’ve found that to be the number one thing that stops me from finding the good solutions, is that I already have a solution in mind, even if it’s just in the back of my head, and as I’m going and doing this, I will just automatically go towards that solution.

So step one, clear your mind, meditate… No solutions. Step two I really think is ask questions. Ask questions about the codebase, about the problem, about whatever it is that is this situation you’re in, and try to find the answers for those. And if the answers are frustrating to find, if it just takes too long to find them, build a tool that makes it really easy. And if you start there, the process of discovery coding will start becoming the easy default, because every time you want to have an answer, you already have tools available to you to help find that answer, and that ends up being like your inspiration for how to continue.

So the goal is to try to make it easy to discovery-code, because if it’s not, you’re never gonna do it. So you kind of have to do the hard work up front.

2.38. The Digital Antiquarian

  • https://www.filfre.net/ Something that makes me highly nostalgic and that gives soul to the gaming as I remember it.

2.39. Programming with LLMs featuring David Crawshaw (Changelog Interviews #629)

  • https://changelog.com/podcast/629 A different take on AI assisted coding than one you have from Primagean, who is much more skeptical. This is more specific, building Go-specific tooling and being passionate about what LLMs can do for us. Also appreciating how code-completion is a completely different paradigm than a chat-bot for AI and how cool that is, pionereed by GitHub Copilot. I am not turning it back on, I don’t depend on the amount of code I write for my paycheck so I rather write by myself, working through the problems alone. Or with occational oblique strategy. Still, it is fascinating what is happening, utterly mezmerizing to watch that.

2.40. New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code

  • https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning Clickbait and Moral Panic or it is really different? I am surely cautious. But the great plus is you CAN build things that until now needed code. If your focus is on craft - no. If your focus is on value - absolutely.

2.41. Change my mind (Changelog & Friends #81)

2.42. GenAI hot takes and bad use cases (Practical AI #304)

  • https://changelog.com/practicalai/304 What’s LLM are currently not good for: high throughput/low latency usecases, complete autonomy, high-stakes forecasting, not top languages (both of human and computer world), … there is more and great!

2.43. The return of the modern data stack - by Benn Stancil

But this SAP product, if it works the way I think it does, extends that idea in a couple of new ways. First, it suggests that applications, like CRMs and ERPs to CPQs and ATSs, could be one of the buckets that databases connect their calculators to. Rather than exporting data out of SAP—which is how people have done this for a while, and it clearly hasn’t gone well—SAP can simply reformat it. Then, people can bring their database—or, since it’s 2025, bring their aGeNtS—directly to the applications themselves.

2.44. The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly

2.45. aposd-vs-clean-code/README.md at main · johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code

2.46. The end of YC - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

2.47. (7) Real Time Traffic Analytics powered by ClickHouse at FlockSafety - YouTube

2.48. Opinion

2.49. (7) Clickhouse: Faster Queries, Faster Answers (with Alasdair Brown) - YouTube

2.50. Demystifying the Parquet File Format

2.51. LeetCode is dead? Privacy is done?

3. MAR-2025

3.1. Opinion

3.2. Docker Compose vs Kubernetes - Differences Explained

3.3. You might not need Redis - viblo.se

3.4. You might not need Redis

3.5. (1) Bjarne Says C++ Is Under Attack - YouTube

3.6. Ep. 343: A Minimal Protocol for Taking Control of Your Life - The Deep Life by Cal Newport

3.7. Can Ukraine—and America—Survive Donald Trump?

3.8. (1) 1.01 - Basics of Operating Systems - YouTube

3.9. (1) MIT 6.828: Operating System Engineering - YouTube

3.10. (1) MIT 6.004 Computation Structures, Spring 2017 - YouTube

3.11. How we built a Scalable Data Platform · JC

  • https://jchandra.com/posts/data-infra/#our-new-data-platform Highly Interesting, but for me essentially highlighting a quite typical - when successful - customer journey that necessitates a creation of OLAP specific platform optimized for cost and performance. The fact you’re stepping away from managed solutions seems alto to be a direction into which market is headed atm.

3.12. DBeaver - Wikipedia

3.13. (1) Vibe Coding Is The Future - YouTube

3.14. How to Increase the Number of Threads in ClickHouse

3.15. Reaching industrial economies of scale with Beyang Liu, CTO of Sourcegraph (Changelog Interviews #632)

3.16. Anchoring effect - Wikipedia

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect Primagean mentioning this in The Future of Vibe Coding. Have Kahneman’s book at home. Still have not read. But mentioned in a book about negotiating (Chris oss’s never split the difference)

3.17. Jason Pepas’ Technical Blog

3.18. alias pf=fzf

3.19. AI Is Here And Students You Are Screwed If You Don’t Take Action

3.20. Building a Paste Service With ClickHouse

3.21. Schedule

3.22. SQL or Death? Seminar Series – Spring 2025

3.23. Practical AI

3.24. Sync Engines are the Future

3.25. Copy copy revolution - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

3.26. Show HN: GizmoSQL – Run DuckDB as a Server with Arrow Flight SQL

3.27. ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God

3.28. StarRocks/starrocks: The world’s fastest open query engine for sub-second analytics both on and off the data lakehouse. With the flexibility to support nearly any scenario, StarRocks provides best-in-class performance for multi-dimensional analytics, real-time analytics, and ad-hoc queries. A Linux Foundation project.

3.29. xan/docs/LOVE_LETTER.md at master · medialab/xan

3.30. Home - The XY Problem

  • https://xyproblem.info/ Great heuristics, think about what the problem is, not how the person you are working with is trying to solve it. Also the problem may be initially poorly formulated.

3.31. Tech

4. APR-2025

4.1. #461 – ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God

4.2. Clickhouse

4.3. The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

4.4. Why Are Beach Holes So Deadly? - YouTube

4.5. Incubation:APM ClickHouse evaluation (#4) · Issues · GitLab.org / incubation-engineering / APM / APM · GitLab

4.6. Prime Reacts - Why I Stopped Using AI Code Editors - YouTube

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3_TY4K8hVE The same point again - reinforced - the loss of Fingerspitzgefuehl, the loss of intuition, the loss of the ability to interact fluently and after the loss the reaction to loss is really negative. May be similar to loss of fluency in a language though. It is not going to be lost completely. It just goes into background and you can refresh it after say a week of pratice if you have years of experience there.

4.7. Advice from Old Tech Heads and Bossware - Article RoundUp - YouTube

4.8. Making A Game GOOD - The Standup EP 3 - YouTube

4.9. Classical liberalism vs. The New Right - Marginal REVOLUTION

4.10. Use AI Now! Prime Reacts - YouTube

4.11. Ep. 346: Getting Smarter in a Dumb World - The Deep Life by Cal Newport

4.12. Strategies to Thrive as AIs get Better - Especially for programmers - YouTube

4.13. This Doesn’t Look Good For AI - The Standup - Ep 4 - YouTube

4.14. The industrialization of IT - by Benn Stancil

4.15. Plavecký stadion Podolí – Wikipedie

4.16. Rails is having a moment (again) with David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails (Changelog Interviews #615)

4.17. The FASTEST and SAFEST Database - YouTube

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC1B3d9C_sI Joran Dirk Greef was also on Changelog(https://changelog.com/podcast/635); Prime was inspired to use asserts more in his code based on this presentation. Amazing that the work originated within Gates Foundation and has “character” i.e. an intention to make banking cheaper for developing world. Plus amazing piece of technology. Fascinating.

4.18. The YX Problem (Reverse XY Problem)

4.19. (4) The Emergency Is Here

4.20. Prometheus and Open-Source Observability with Eric Schabell - Software Engineering Daily

4.21. Prometheus and Open-Source Observability with Eric Schabell - Software Engineering Daily

4.22. Prometheus and Open-Source Observability with Eric Schabell - Software Engineering Daily

4.23. The Best Programmers I Know

5. MAY-2025

5.1. Opinion

5.2. Practical AI

  • https://practicalai.fm/310 Listening about All Hands - AI coding machine and its CEO doing some coding and creation in short time between meetings or on the way to work from the phone. Sounds like an interesting assistant.

5.3. I’d rather read the prompt

5.4. We Shut Down Snowflake - And Here’s Why - by Arturas Tutkus

5.5. What is data at rest?

5.6. Pluralistic: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’ (23 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

5.7. On The Death of Daydreaming - by Christine Rosen

5.8. Dijkstra On the foolishness of natural

5.9. How To Become The BEST Engineer At Your Company - YouTube

5.10. JUST USE HTML - YouTube

5.11. Page not found – Software Engineering Radio

5.12. Coding Should Be A Vibe - YouTube

5.13. Test

5.14. Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You - YouTube

5.15. After months of coding with LLMs, I’m going back to using my brain • albertofortin.com

5.16. It’s hard to write code for computers, but it’s even harder to write code for humans · Erik Bernhardsson

5.17. Its Finally Over For Devs (again, fr fr ong) - YouTube

5.18. The Copilot Delusion

5.19. The ads are coming - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

5.20. The ads are coming - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

  • https://benn.substack.com/p/the-ads-are-coming When I see many people paying $20/month for GPT+ or Perplexity, I have an impression that the internet is about the undergo a transformation of its business model (+web3 may have a word to say there). That may be a temporary delusion.

5.21. Its Finally Over For Devs (again, fr fr ong) - YouTube

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MUNWKQ9_9c&t=1178s The vibes have changed - another round. 3 things that make professional eng: communication+architecture(theory)+coding(practice). All three required. Amazing how Prime cut it at the moment it dawned on him the thing’s written by the AI.

5.22. Carson Gross

5.23. In-depth: ClickHouse vs Snowflake - PostHog

5.24. As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook : Juha-Matti Santala

5.25. Show HN: I wrote a modern Command Line Handbook

5.26. Keynote Speaker - Cory Doctorow - YouTube

Fallthrough

####

(1) Progressives Are Driving Themselves Into Extinction

Claude 4, Anthropic Agents, Human-AI Agents – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

233. The

Well-rounded doesn’t cut.

  • https://sive.rs/rounded AI-assisted synthesis? No, have voice, face, uniqueness during work with people. It’s an extra spice and a necessary one. Also you know what you actually submit. Never submit shit.

Steve Yegge on productive vibe coding, the death of the IDE, babysitting a fleet of AI coding agents - YouTube

Smart People Don’t Chase Goals; They Create Limits

sketch blog: How I program with Agents

  • https://sketch.dev/blog/programming-with-agents Learn fundamentals. Stay close to hard thinking. Don’t get carried away by access to Windsurf or any other “servant”. »> There is a lot to do, and I suspect in six months things will be very different again. Curiosity and humility will get us through it, but even more than usual I would suggest turning away from internet forums where people talk in circles about this technology. That is a job for an agent.

How to use the lsof command to troubleshoot Linux

Timescale Is Now TigerData

Practical AI

DynamoDB vs MongoDB: Choose One and Say No to SQL - Kinsta®

I Want to be a Journey Programmer Again

Load Test GlassFlow for ClickHouse: Real-Time Dedup at Scale

(1) The Copilot Delusion - YouTube

Are you stuck in movie logic? - by Cate Hall

  • https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/are-you-stuck-in-movie-logic TSo John Bradshaw, the “inner child” meme author, taught that life is a series of problems that need to be confronted. This essay is about the first crucial step, and one of the most challenging thing in computer science — naming. Naming problem allows interacting with it. Naming is what wizards do in SICP. Also, my wife challenges my appreciation of 5 love languages basically by saying that love is mutual confrontation of problems and that begins with naming and sharig the problem. I still like to get gifts x)

Writing documentation for AI: best practices

The Who Cares Era - YouTube

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILTJPYn_WTs&ab_channel=ThePrimeTime One of the “downsides” is not caring anymore if the relevation appears. Well you do care if you have skin in that game. Like being an academic and reading thesis AI generated. In my millieu, there are massive kick-outs from thesis defensese due to this. These people do care. Wider public? Probably not much. Benn Stancil has a great post on this in https://benn.substack.com/p/meme-company on cluely, providing an interesting analogy of what zero-cost content generation (with digital photography say) did with AI. People became important, not their works (MrBeast yes, but his specific video no).

A survey of LSM-Tree based Indexes, Data Systems and KV-stores

####

  • https://benn.substack.com/p/meme-company in a world where foundation models improve 10x every 18 months, building infrastructure is like decorating a house you’re about to demolish. the smart money isn’t on building the best product - it’s on being the default option when the underlying tech finally works.

The Rest Is History

LLMs bring new nature of abstraction

  • https://martinfowler.com/articles/2025-nature-abstraction.html Martin Fowler believes AI’s not a hype. Change similar to the arrival of Higher Level languages and complier where you stopped writing against a particular instruction set. + non-determinism is a big one. Let’s see. Still think that the best investment is into foundations and classics.

Ezra Klein: The Case Against Writing With AI

QuadrupleA/sqlite-page-explorer: Visual tool to explore SQLite databases page-by-page, the way they’re stored on disk and the way SQLite sees them.

How to Network as an Introvert

Start with: “How do you spend most of your time?” Not “What do you do?” It opens people up beyond job titles.

Don’t Ignore Your Moral Intuition About Phones - Cal Newport