After five years in production kafka-delta-ingest at Scribd has been shut off and removed from our infrastructure. kafka-delta-ingest was the motivation behind my team creating delta-rs, the most successful open source project I have started to date. With kafka-delta-ingest we achieved our original stated goals and reduced streaming data ingestion costs by 95%. In the time since however, we have further reduced that cost with even more efficient infrastructure.

Did you know that AWS S3 is almost 20 years old? The “cloud” as a concept is fairly recent but in the time-distortion that has occurred since the rise of the internet, I think many of us have lost track of how old some of these public cloud providers are, and as a side-effect, how old their technology offerings can become. Periodically you need to clean out the attic, and this week AWS did just that with their “AWS Service Availability Updates.”

What a wild time to be alive. It’s really quite something. How wonderful it is to have a phrase like “what a wild time to be alive” that could mean a dozen different moderately positive or extremely negative things depending on where in your news or social feed you find this article.

Every Tuesday morning at 7am I have a date.

Abusive traffic from AI-based bots or application is becoming more prevelant which is why I’m thrilled to introduce the general availability of recoil. Recoil is a highly sophisticated honeypot which can serve a never-ending stream of data to abusive traffic.

Rust has a useful concept of “features” baked into its packaging tool cargo which allows developers to optionally toggle functionality on and off. In a simple project features are simple, as you would expect. In more complex projects which use cargo workspaces the behavior of features becomes much more complicated and in some cases..surprising!

Storing bytes at scale is never as simple as we lead ourselves to believe. The concept of files, or in the cloud “objects”, is a useful metaphor for an approximation of reality but it’s not actually reality. As I have fallen deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, my mental model of what is storage really has been challenged at every turn.

I have been using sccache to improve feedback loops with large Rust projects and it has been going okay but it hasn’t been the silver bullet I was hoping for. sccache can be easily dropped into any Rust project as a wrapper around rustc, the Rust compiler, and it will perform caching of intermediate build artifacts. As dependencies are built, their object files are cached, locally or remotely, and can be re-used on future compilations. sccache also supports distributed compilation which can compile those objects on different computers, pulling the object files back for the final result. I had initially hoped that sccache would solve all my compile performance problems, but surprising to nobody, there are some caveats.

For an upcoming hack week I wanted to have some live jam sessions with colleagues on a video call. Mostly I wanted some background music we could listen to while we hacked together, occasionally discussing our work, etc. I don’t normally use Pulseaudio in anger but it seemed like the closest and potentially simplest solution.

Words cannot express how excited I am for the coming margin squeeze on every “AI company” that isn’t Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, or Google. The entire industry is built on an unethical foundation, having illegitimately acquired massive amounts of content from practically everybody. The companies selling “AI Coding Assistants” I am particularly excited to see implode.