Plugging the Postgres Upgrade Hole

Upgrading Postgres is hard. I’ve felt the pain, even upgrading local databases. The article outlines why that is the case. Maybe there is some hope for the future.

What is a Staff Engineer?

It uses a new-to-me framework for evaluating a job on 4 levels: Core technical skill, product management, project management, and people management. It then talks about what a Staff engineers does in each of these levels.

How we made a Ruby method 200x faster

A tale of performance optimization by using a profiler. How to focus on the important parts of a flame graph still seems a bit like a dark art. And not the key point of the article, but the refactor looks really nice!