The first week of 2023! Also the week that we got back to life and need to deal with all the hard work about it. Some is for work: I was involved into the discovery phase of a major undertaking of our company, and now need to lead the execute for the related projects. Some is for life: we are busy planning our move in a week, and I am busy installing and assembling stuff in our new home. So not a lot of reading and side project for this week!

Reading

I spent a lot of time driving in week, so I picked up an audible book: Build by Tony Fadell. A lot of interesting insights and anecdotals about building ground-breaking produces, which most of the examples are around iPod and Nest. I had a lot of fun listening and may pick up a physical book to actually read and try to internalize the ideas.

The 5% Rule reminds me about the right mindset to deal with horrible landlords and tenants. Bad things happen, just move on with your life.

The optimistic take is that if 3%-5% of people just suck, you really have permission to free your mind of those people and just focus on taking care of the people who don't suck. Just expect it and move about your day.

Databases in 2022: A Year in Review by Andy Pavlo.

My main takeaway is that there were too many Database startups in the field, which makes it hard to imagine they can all exit successfully. Those who improve/enhance existing popular DBMSs might have a better chance than those try to replace them. Some to keep an eye on:

• dbt
• ReadySet
• Keebo
• OtterTune

Also, I am intrigued by this prediction:

==The long-term trend to watch is the proliferation of frameworks like Velox, DataFusion, and Polars. Along with projects like Substrait, the commoditization of these query execution components means that all OLAP DBMSs will be roughly equivalent in the next five years.== Instead of building a new DBMS entirely from scratch or hard forking an existing system (e.g., how Firebolt forked Clickhouse), people are better off using an extensible framework like Velox. This means that every DBMS will have the same vectorized execution capabilities that were unique to Snowflake ten years ago. And since in the cloud, the storage layer is the same for everyone (e.g., Amazon controls EBS/S3), the critical differentiator between DBMS offerings will be things that are difficult to quantify, like UI/UX stuff and query optimization.

Two articles about the book "The Mom Test".

They own the problem. You own the solution., which is a quote from the book. This changes the perspective of how I think about business problems.

It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

The Mom Test - How to talk to customers. A Summary is a longer and more complete summary of the ideas in the book.