James Cowling

LLMs love writing @convex_dev code so we made an app-builder to let them do it. Convex Chef: The AI builder that knows backend. Get cooking...

Ain't no one got time to log in to stuff. Now you can use @convex.dev without an account! Just npm i convex and npx convex dev.

Building an AI agent or need a durable workflow? Day 2 of @convex.dev Vibe Week is dedicated to you. New agent framework and durable workflow engine ready to go, check out links in the reply.

Day 1 of @convex.dev Vibe Week is a go! Announcing official release of our MCP server folks have been trialing. Check out the vid and the links in the reply. Stay tuned for more tomorrow!

Remember when a beta label actually meant something then Gmail was beta for half a decade and ruined it for everyone? We just took a bunch of @convex.dev features out of beta. What's the point of long-term beta if customers depend on it already?

Ok this is legitimately cool. Cursor talking to @convex.dev via MCP and figuring out schema improvements based on the rows actually stored in the database, performed in constant time!

We launched Fullstack-Bench yesterday to test autonomous agent performance on fullstack coding tasks. Starting with Convex, FastAPI, Supabase but more backends to come. stack.convex.dev/introducing-... Three design patterns stood out at producing high quality code with minimal interventions: 🧵

2. Express as much as possible in standard, procedural code. Agents are great reasoning about code but less good dealing with declarative languages or configs outside the codebase. Keep as much as possible in the code itself and as little as possible in SQL or external configs.

We launched Fullstack-Bench yesterday to test autonomous agent performance on fullstack coding tasks. Starting with Convex, FastAPI, Supabase but more backends to come. stack.convex.dev/introducing-... Three design patterns stood out at producing high quality code with minimal interventions: 🧵

We just launched self-hosted @convex.dev! We open sourced last year but realized the code was open but not so useful on its own. This time we've included the Convex dashboard, bindings for Postgres, SQLite (and MySQL v. soon), packaged up in a docker container ready for real use

Cloud-hosted Convex is still the best place to start for most folks getting started, plus includes a very usable free tier, but we're really glad to have the self-hosted option available for people whose needs fall outside our hosted plans.

We just launched self-hosted @convex.dev! We open sourced last year but realized the code was open but not so useful on its own. This time we've included the Convex dashboard, bindings for Postgres, SQLite (and MySQL v. soon), packaged up in a docker container ready for real use

A good design principle is APIs that look cheap should be cheap and APIs that are expensive should look expensive. One mistake we made in an old version of Dropbox was that directory moves looked cheap (drag a folder) but were expensive on the server (update metadata for every file in the tree).

A design mistake we made with @convex.dev is that the .filter() operator looks convenient, even though it does a table scan, while the .withIndex() syntax for efficiently reading from an index looks a little cumbersome and expensive. We'll fix this in v2.

Got to sit down with Professor @andypavlo.bsky.social on the latest @convex.dev Databased podcast for his 2024 databases year in review! www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B-M...

We covered OSS db licensing challenges with Redis and Elastic; the Databricks vs Snowflake turf war; the rise of @duckdb.org; why we love SQLite; Deterministic Simulation Testing, Rust, and @tur.so's rewrite; Postgres, MySQL and Aurora DSQL; new acquisitions like Rockset into OpenAI; and much more.

If you want to get good building systems and databases you should go work for a bigger company or a startup with serious infra demands. It's hard to develop excellence thinking about scale, correctness and architecture in an environment where these aren't critical to the business

It can be hard to break into a new domain but most folks I've mentored in systems engineering started as devs in adjacent teams who stood out by taking the time to learn how the systems worked above and below them in the stack and being proactive fixing things when they break.

It's easy to roll your eyes at Company Values but hopefully you actually value *something*. A good set of values can have a huge enduring impact on decision-making at a company. I wrote a guide on the process I follow for picking values at a company stack.convex.dev/company-values