Al Brown 🐢

I was excited that GitHub stacked PRs were finally available. Stuck "merging" for 24 hours. It was naive of me to expect GitHub to work properly.

I wanted to detect if the invoker of my CLI was AI. Here's a Rust crate to do that, detecting environment variables that harnesses set on entry. alasdairb.com/posts/is-ai-...

By solving core issues of access, usability and context, AI is changing the way we interact with data. The future isn't dashboards; it's conversations.

Happy 14th birthday to my best lil boy ♥️

Guess I'm moving my projects off vercel; is @netlify.com the best bet? Haven't used it in a while. Maybe just Cloudflare?

📢 ClickHouse’s New Observability Stack Unveiled 📢 #ClickHouse is doubling down on #observability with the release of #ClickStack Check out my fireside chat with @mikeshi42.bsky.social, Head of observability @clickhouse.com, co-founder @hyperdx.bsky.social : 👉 horovits.medium.com/clickstack-c...

The UK's new age verification law for "adult content" is an identity fraud timb bomb. The most idiotic, tech-illiterate law passed in some time. Do not verify using your ID. Use a VPN.

Well that's a month in Tokyo at an end. Currently on the way to the Hook of Holland to catch the ferry home - first time in NL and I'm in awe of these greenhouses! Bonkers

Angie has been discharged from the hospital 🥰🥰 He didn't enjoy his time in recovery, too scared to eat so we'd visit and hand feed him each day, but now he's home devouring food and snoring like a train ♥️

We got to visit Angie in recovery today; he's still in his oxygen crate, but he's awake and alert. Wagged his tail and scratched his beans to demand we release him. He's off all heart meds ♥️🥰

He made it through surgery 🥰♥️ They just finished sewing him up, everything was routine. First hurdle down 🥺🥺

Pre-op bloods done, he's getting in some last minute window time

We made it all the way to Tokyo, and it's now 2 hours until this boy has heart surgery ♥️

We did a little spring photoshoot at the weekend

Arroyo is joining @cloudflare.social! We're bringing Arroyo to the Developer Platform as a serverless stream processing system, and will also remain open-source and self-hostable. www.arroyo.dev/blog/arroyo-...

this is gonna be pretty interesting blog.cloudflare.com/r2-data-cata...

new gig, new gear ✅

Gemini 2.5 Pro does seem to perform better at coding for me, but the integration in Windsurf is not nearly as good as Claude 3.7 yet

When I turned 30 last year, someone told me "30 is when your bones are no longer made of rubber". I am currently incapacitated by neck pain. Were they just warning me, or was it a curse?

marketers sharting VIBE CODING in every single LinkedIn post hits like my mum texting YOLO

I tried Gemini in Sheets a year ago, it was shit. I tried it again today, it is still shit. Impressive in its own way.

I made caramel. I burnt my mouth.

DuckDB got a local UI. Thanks to our friends at MotherDuck, you can now interact with your DuckDB database through an interactive notebook, running on localhost. Read the announcement blog post at duckdb.org/2025/03/12/d...

I want to talk about my move from Substack to Ghost for a second, and what it's been like working with a nonprofit tech company that actually lives its values. Especially if you're a writer still on Subtack, please read. 1/x First of all, about the org: They are a nonprofit, I just met employee +

I have left Tinybird ✌️ My mum doesn't think my bespoke crochet dog jumper business plan is a winner, but she prefers cats anyway, so what does she know...

ParadeDB is hiring for a few roles around Postgres internals and infrastructure. Introduce me to the best database engineer you know (or reach out if that's you!) Postings: paradedb.notion.site/ParadeDB-Job...

I feel this

DEEP .... SEEK 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Do you think we'll reach a point where humans become so dumb from offloading all thought to AI that AI will start researching "Human Intelligence" to smarten us up because it's tired of us being so thick?

Hilariously/depressingly accurate. But apparently it's literally impossible to do sales ANY other way.

1/11. ParadeDB is now integrated with Postgres block storage. As far as we know, no one has integrated a search and analytics engine with Postgres storage before. This is a big deal. Here's why we did it, how we did it, and why you should care. 🧵

Introducing Dub Conversions 📈 Track how your clicks convert to signups and sales with our end-to-end attribution engine. Featuring native integrations with Stripe, Shopify, @clerk.com, @supabase.com etc. Learn more about @dub.co Conversions: d.to/conversions

I built a little MCP experiment called Claudekeep before the new year. I wasn't doing much with it as it was just for learning, but @anthropic.com sent me a takedown notice for trademark infringement today, so it's gone. Oh well 🤷‍♂️ Maybe I'll call the next one ChatMCP.

Bluebird CLI v1.0.11 published this morning with better support for non-SASL Kafka. Thanks to @gschmutz.bsky.social for the PR!

The only Meta product I still use is WhatsApp...and only because I haven't convinced my partner and parents to use Signal...will 2025 finally be the year?

Ah, I see the reason for the exodus. I was only keeping Threads for dog pics anyway...I'll just spend more time staring at my own dog instead.

Has there been a Threads exodus or something?

It's my first day back, easing in by releasing a set of trigger.dev tasks for @tinybird.co A few tinybird customers were already using trigger and told me about it; it's a code-first scheduler with a lovely DX, making this a pleasantly simple intro to the new year www.npmjs.com/package/@sda...

I mostly avoided social over the holidays, so happy new year!

12 months ago I had just given notice at Google. I was terrified and had no idea that 2024 would be the most remarkable year of my life. For each like on this post I’ll share something that 2023 me didn’t know. First: running your own business can actually be LESS scary than being an employee.

Corporate wants you to find the puppy in this picture

There are many incremental processing solutions, but they seem to never quite do what I need. I decided to build an extension that just keeps running the same command in Postgres with different parameters to do fast, reliable incremental data processing. That's pg_incremental. 1/n

Got a question for #dataBS: Anyone ever survived a data migration with a story to tell—the good, the bad, or the "we’ll laugh about this someday"? I’m writing a technical piece and I’d love to hear your wins, cautionary tales, and hard-earned lessons. Please DM if you're keen!