Martin Kleppmann
@martin
Associate Professor at @cst.cam.ac.uk, researching decentralised systems and security protocols. Advisor to the Bluesky team. Wrote “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” (O’Reilly). he/him
lol thank you IEEE for giving me a good laugh (CC @mweidner.bsky.social)
There's a special category of spam: dubious book promoters targeting authors. Mostly the emails are just lazy AI slop. But occasionally they are amusing, such as this one, praising the "character development, psychological depth" of a technical book that definitely has none of either of those 🤪
Designing Data-Intensive Applications contains a joke about datacenters in space, since at the time of writing, that seemed like an absurd thing to even contemplate. And yet, here we are, with the biggest ever IPO prospectus promising orbital datacenters. I guess I'll have to update that paragraph.
Apparently Amazon will not allow me to read the reviews of my own book
Looking forward to giving the morning keynote at QCon London in half an hour
Just received my author copies of the second edition of DDIA! After years of seeing it only on-screen, holding the final print book in hand is very special. @chris.blue
The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)
I finally got to visit UC Berkeley for the first time today! Gave a talk and had good discussions about distributed systems with @joehellerstein.bsky.social & others from his group
The rise and fall of Stack Overflow. Graph shows number of questions posted per month. Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648...
We got a white Christmas (with a light dusting of snow) in southern Germany! Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it! 🎄❄️
Anyone know why you can’t take coconuts, spices, or umbrellas on the plane?
I got to go to India for the first time for my brother’s wedding. What a magical experience! And a nice opportunity to wear some colourful Indian outfits 😊
Stumbled across some old photos of the first computer I built myself, circa 1998. I installed it in a metal tool box into which I cut some holes. The handle was very convenient for carrying the computer to LAN parties.
It’s the instructions for “drop of liquid above five triangles in random orientations, separated by a horizontal line”, which I can only guess means “cleaning”
Our new Philips egg cooker came with no textual instructions, only pictorial ones. How many people without a chemistry degree are likely to figure out what “4% AcOH” means? (Spoiler: it means “vinegar”)
One way in which AI enriches my life is that I can go from “ooh, that’s a funky looking caterpillar” to a fun Wikipedia rabbithole in a few seconds, thanks to iOS’s automatic plant and animal detection in photos. This is a cinnabar moth caterpillar, apparently
The Cambridge Peregrines folks caught it and brought it back to the nest on the roof
Nice idea by @lambda.bsky.social to make mugs for co-authors celebrating our papers 🎉☕️
Summer is here, exam/dissertation marking is done, and we’ve already harvested 2kg of raspberries and turned them into jam ☀️🎉
Very cool that the university bus service has a numberplate UNI4BUS. There’s just one problem… it’s on the U2 bus line, not U4
Nice impressions from @localfirstconf.com (photography by Susanne Elsässer)
Got the cover design for the second edition of DDIA from the publisher. Now just need to finish the effin’ manuscript…
Nonmonotonic clock spotted in the wild: I left `ping` running in the background on my laptop while it went to sleep, and later I found that my minimum round-trip time was a negative number!