rick branson @rbranson Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@ACELYAA_OZAN

@bkasymaly

@00Yii

@piercesweenz

@GayoftheDead

@AdityaHarchand

@table_luke

@JJgodly2

@AMARIEBL

@bbclaurak

@kororochi

@PashtuSex

@llUxxUl6

@BrinkmannLab

@Aajad_1

@KasihLudah

@vojihon

@joemcelderry91

@ReshLtaif

@asembis

@MARVELO21233993

@Regina00019873

@Bentalls

@jaybny

@TTDOuAKyBOXioZg

@lilka_luk_hel

@MahanagarBjp

@mojbjazan

@apenasPz

@stw_pdg

@tac_collective

@SimuRacer

@wmoorlag

@bankofireIand

@Camibog23

@Rema_xx0987

rick branson

@rbranson

11 months

@growing_daniel the worst part of steve jobs' legacy is tech CEOs thinking they should do product keynotes

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

when u were living the good life as a staff+ engineer and u get “promoted” into management

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

For every 10 likes this gets, I'll ask ChatGPT to make this Kubernetes Administrator a bit more weary.

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

one of the funniest things i’ve ever heard is that bartenders in sf call techbros “backpacks”

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rick branson

@rbranson

8 months

when someone says my API is too hard to understand

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

the new cohort will never know the glory of the 2010s

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

There are two buried leads in the Segment/Twilio news: 1) This is the biggest YC acquisition by a large margin. Cruise was next at $1B. 2) The company was setup so that everyone on the team shared in this win, including alumni. Let's expand on this... [1/11]

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rick branson

@rbranson

7 years

Never forget.

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

Chia has grown almost 1 exabyte (974PiB) in the last 24 hours. The scale of this is hard to comprehend. Creating plots at this rate burns up the equivalent of one 1TB Samsung Evo SSD every 3 seconds. An exabyte is 125,000 8TB drives or $25,000,000 in Seagate USB drives.

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 months

@growing_daniel same steve?

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

harsh but fair

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

We're cancelling each other over database takes today. Post your cancellable database take.

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rick branson

@rbranson

6 years

The PTSD stack: PagerDuty, Twitter, Slack, Datadog

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

miami is a lie

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

where all the staff+ homies at

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rick branson

@rbranson

8 years

It's hard to overstate how important this lesson is — "there is no magic, just software" via @ferlatte

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rick branson

@rbranson

1 year

this thing is so cursed

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rick branson

@rbranson

8 years

This is quite possibly the best HN comment of all time. 💯

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rick branson

@rbranson

5 years

A shitty part about getting older is no longer being able to hold strong convictions. This makes it hard to be a Twitter thought leader. Like I'd love to be a "huge monorepo advocate" or a "major serverless shill" but all I can think of are the downsides.

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

oh noes

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

Be very skeptical when you read statements like "40-70% of the US population will be infected over the next 12-18 months" because that's just not the way reputable scientists talk about forecasts.

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

I've always had a hard time taking the whole "agile" movement seriously given that, in my experience, velocity and agility have SO MUCH MORE to do with the software's architecture than how work is planned. [1/7]

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

"she is worshipped as a deity. her followers only know the symbol of the kubernetes logo, but have no concept of kubernetes as a concrete concept. they do know they would be relegated to a life of hard labor, manually entering kubectl commands without her."

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

$559 million worth of Chia's currency (XCH) has been farmed, so at this point Chia likely is a net economic negative, just based purely on a few surface-level metrics.

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rick branson

@rbranson

5 years

Queues are bad, but software developers love them. You'd think they would magically fix any overload or failure problem. But they don't, and bring with them a bunch of their own problems.

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rick branson

@rbranson

1 year

engineering managers:

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

no kid is thinking they want to grow up to "facilitate organizational alignment" and yet here we all are, truly amazing work comrades

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

"this kubernetes administrator works 14 hour days and hasn't taken a shower in a month, hasn't left the office in days. at this point they are just typing kubectl with random strings!!!"

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

"she has begun to merge with the machine in a fit of desperation to remain alive as she administers this kubernetes deployment"

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

10/ @holman has compiled a dope list of startups with extended exercise windows. You should work for one. It says a lot about the character of its leadership.

GitHub - holman/extended-exercise-windows: A list of startups that have employee-friendly terms for...

A list of startups that have employee-friendly terms for exercising your options past 90 days. - holman/extended-exercise-windows

github.com

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

@kthorjensen 93/7 ground beef for that dry leather mouthfeel

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rick branson

@rbranson

7 years

I co-wrote this piece on allocation efficiency in Go. Please tell me what you think and if we missed something big!

Golang Memory Management: Allocation Efficiency in Go Services

segment.com

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

It’s 3 times more expensive to send 1TB of data out of Amazon EC2 than it is to buy a 1TB drive from Amazon.

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

"she has further merged with the machine. she no longer needs a keyboard. her brain is directly jacked into the kubernetes apiserver."

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

5/ This speaks to the incredible character and long-term thinking of the founding team. Major key: they now have a whole roster of talented folks who they can call on for the rest of their careers. These folks can trust that they'll be taken care of. Very powerful.

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rick branson

@rbranson

5 years

Sharing SQLite databases across containers is surprisingly brilliant.

Sharing SQLite databases across containers is surprisingly brilliant

This is a graph of latency in milliseconds. It’s the latency of Segment’s streaming pipeline fetching a very core piece of…

rbranson.medium.com

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rick branson

@rbranson

6 years

100% compatible thoughts: 1) JavaScript is a garbage PL 2) It is worth being proficient at JavaScript 3) Frontend is its own highly respectable field, not a stepping stone to more “hardcore” pursuits

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

"that is NOT weary enough!!!!!!! she should look like a SHELL of herself!"

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

PostgreSQL really is the world's best database, but isn't perfect.

10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL

Over the last few years, the software development community’s love affair with the popular open-source relational database has reached a…

rbranson.medium.com

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rick branson

@rbranson

8 years

when u run a terraform command

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

"she continues to merge into the machine. she can now administer millions of kubernetes clusters. she has become kubectl, controller of clusters."

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

the quarterly planning model where everyone stops and pretends to plans an entire quarter of work all at the same time is one of the greatest business scams

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

"even more tired, even more junk piled everywhere, even less human looking"

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

don't do a monorepo unless you plan on actually making time to deal with monorepo-specific problems.

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rick branson

@rbranson

1 year

apparently svb has $1.1B in outstanding loans for "premium wine"

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

one does not simply…

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rick branson

@rbranson

1 year

You've been chosen to receive a million dollars but you have to spend a month locked in a room with one of these guys. Who do you choose?

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rick branson

@rbranson

5 months

this is basically what it’s like to be a FAANG employee vesting RSUs

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

"she further ascends. her consciousness is now fully integrated into the machine. her corporeal being has long been discarded. society no longer even thinks of kubernetes, but it is there. she is there. administering the systems."

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rick branson

@rbranson

7 months

@easterngoblin

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

Over the year I've been at @planetscaledata , developers have consistently asked us the question: "when are you going to support PostgreSQL?" The answer: We aren't. That's it. But why? 🧵 1/

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

2/ Point #2 was long-term thinking that started many years ago when they eliminated the post-employment exercise time limit (typically 90 days) from their employee option agreements. This is *KEY*

Calvin French-Owen

@calvinfo

9 years

@hunterwalk yup, we've started doing this at Segment

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rick branson

@rbranson

1 year

@mscccc i know we're just having fun here but a lot of this is because ppl often don't differentiate between magic values (meaning can't be extracted contextually) and context-explained constants (like an inline SQL query)

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rick branson

@rbranson

6 months

@growing_daniel i've been a customer for 14 years and now this...

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

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rick branson

@rbranson

7 years

Alexa turn on S3 in us-east-1

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rick branson

@rbranson

5 years

Junior engineers: focus on improving by learning documented best practices Mid-level engineers: hones skills watching and learning from their colleagues Senior engineers: god damnit what the fuck does this JIRA even mean??? who the fuck told the customer we would do this???????

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

Well, I have to say, the @planetscaledata beta launch day went SLIGHTLY better than anticipated... 🤯

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

what amazon kept secret until now: this is a photo of EBS in us-east-1c

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rick branson

@rbranson

5 months

people who have never been inside a datacenter before: yeah the cloud is overpriced, you can just buy servers from dell me: ok so if i add a perc h810 to my 730xd to wire it to an md1200 using sff-8088 cables, can i add 12 SATA disks as JBOD passthrough?

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

After 4 and a half incredible years (and an exit!), I’m closing out my time at @segment soon. Next month, I’m joining engineering at @planetscaledata . I quickly became enamored by the team and the vision, and couldn’t let this one pass. 🥂

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

oh. seems legit then.

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rick branson

@rbranson

5 years

Just look at this cursed stock photo.

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

relocated

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rick branson

@rbranson

8 months

@mcmansionhell i love how the background of the rendering makes it look like it's for hamsters

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rick branson

@rbranson

1 year

@thechosenberg it does matter to extremely insecure small peepee guys

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 months

@growing_daniel @rikki9501 my dudes in profile

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rick branson

@rbranson

8 years

You either die an engineer or live long enough to do biz dev

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rick branson

@rbranson

9 months

even more weary!

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

when you see all 3 at once you know you already got covid

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rick branson

@rbranson

8 years

The dominance of open office spaces in tech despite overwhelming evidence they are bad really puts the "science" in "computer science."

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rick branson

@rbranson

6 years

OH: “server farm to database table”

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rick branson

@rbranson

1 year

can’t believe this study only had one Director of Engineering

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

engineering management is actually just spending your entire day pretending to understand things that you are embarrassed you didn't already know about.

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rick branson

@rbranson

8 years

when the "full stack developer" who just discovered microservices leaves the team and its just u

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

8/ They can choose to leave bad bosses. They can choose to leave unethical companies. They can take unpaid leave to care for family members. They can choose to work on things that are fulfilling and empowering, not only for the paycheck.

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rick branson

@rbranson

5 years

The thing that nobody talks about with the whole sidecar pattern is how much CPU it burns. If you're moving a lot of data in/out through the proxies it can be non-trivial. Adding 10-15% to your compute budget is a serious ask.

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

6/ It's tempting to get cajoled into not doing this or ditching it by the rest of the cap table, some of whom see alumni as "deserters" or "unbelievers" undeserving of a windfall, but the reality is that these sorts of restrictions just amplify privilege.

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

4/ Instead of only those who were already well-off, who could put the cash up to exercise becoming *even richer*, this changed the lives of a substantial number of households. Perhaps 100s have dramatically increased financial freedom.

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

7/ I am THRILLED that so many of my hard-working colleagues and former colleagues can now live a life freer of the burden of financial pressure, one of the key ways capitalism terrorizes labor.

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rick branson

@rbranson

10 years

A paper on translating x86 into what looks like English prose, but is valid x86, to mask exploit code. Omg. http://t.co/0Avlt973ps

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

like most caches, Docker's image cache comes with a capacity limit, at which point it will start to free up space by pruning LRU images. oh wait, no it doesn't. you copy-paste some random commands in from the internet every time you run out of disk space. yeah yeah. cool cool.

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 months

@growing_daniel “power macintosh g4”

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

ok it’s kinda cool that we influenced the latest UUID spec

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rick branson

@rbranson

7 years

This paper on AWS Aurora internals came out recently. Really impressive. Glad to be building stuff ontop of it.

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

Making an AI chatbot that just responds "hell yeah brother" to everything you say

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rick branson

@rbranson

7 years

My new sticker is everything (thanks @ejcx_ !)

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

end-to-end tests: i am fundamentally flawed and you should use me sparingly every newly formed eng team: i can fix him

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

3/ It means that exiting employees who couldn't afford to exercise their options after they left the company didn't need to, and still very much benefited from this exit. Unfortunately, most startup employees don't exercise when they leave.

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rick branson

@rbranson

10 years

Redis http://t.co/J4AJr40dnE

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

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rick branson

@rbranson

6 years

Things I once held as sincere beliefs: * Databases are bad queue backends * Static typing is a waste of time * Monoliths are always worse * Strong consistency isn't worth fighting for * Using the "right" tool always trumps using the one you know * The JVM sucks

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rick branson

@rbranson

2 years

this place is unbelievable

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

“Working from home is great!” I nervously explain to Wilson, the volleyball that has become a permanent fixture on my dining table. “At least he doesn’t try to tell me about the superiority of GCP,” I tell myself, as a kind of consolation.

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

Didn’t think I’d ever have this privilege, let alone before 40. We did it. 🏠

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

Why is their no relatively easy-to-use, decomposed library for distributed fault-tolerant consensus (i.e. "libpaxos")? Why do we have to use etcd or ZooKeeper or comply with a very needy Raft library? It's Time For Some Game Theory... 🧵

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

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rick branson

@rbranson

4 years

distributed lock stored in Redis

status annoyicus

@medburnbook

4 years

give me a horror story from your specialty in five words or less

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rick branson

@rbranson

3 years

@Getfreetext1 @LyanneMelendez @abc7newsbayarea @Walgreens @chesaboudin CA law is that $950 or below is a misdemeanor, this is within the same ballpark as most other states. NY: $1,000 TX: $1,500 VA: $1,000 WA: $750 FL: $750

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