Agere sequitur esse on Eduardo's blog

In the age of AI-assisted coding, it’s easy to feel that deep knowledge of programming languages has become obsolete.

A recent exchange on linkedin about what data is and how to store it prompted me to write this small piece, since I consider the issue at hand quite fundamental to developing systems that reflect reality and therefore help people.

Introduction The setup Laying the foundation The foundation: schemas and user roles for modularity Domains Accounts, managed and external Transfers, constrained by a state machine and temporal periods Transfer state history Account auditing Transactions,…

[BROKEN LINK: blog/google-cloud-s-outage-should-not-have-happened-and-they-seem-to-be-missing-the-point-on-how-to-avoid-it-in-the-future.pre-processed.org], another global IT outage happened (dèjá vu strikes again in our industry).

Hallucinations in GPTs can lead to the dissemination of false information, creating harmful outcomes in applications of critical decision making or leading to mistrust in AI.

I find that it is hard for me to motivate myself to learn a subject that one cannot define.

[BROKEN LINK: blog/analyzing-crowdstrike-s-root-cause-analysis-or-on-missing-the-point-about-quality.pre-processed.org], this time at Google Cloud Platform (team 2025), taking down with it large swaths of the internet (Zeff 2025).

Every software project needs to represent the reality of the business he is embedded in.

Underpinning relational databases you find a very powerful principle: all your information should be represented as attributes drawn from domains in relations(Pascal 2020).

Recently there has been an interest in cheating(?)

Are you managing/developing a PostgreSQL based application?

Have you heard that having decoupled systems is paramount to dealing with complexity at the heart of software?

As an engineering manager(EM), one of your core tasks is to build and maintain a team of high performance.

If you have a distributed system one of the main worries you probably have is scalability.

Are you looking into event sourcing?

Are you considering doing event sourcing?

A global IT outage occurred on [2024-07-18 Thu], with several industries having significant economic problems (see Appendix 1: The impact for some quotes on what happened).

It is becoming more common for companies to come out with stories on the downsides of distributed microservice architectures1(Kolny 2023; Ghemawat et al. 2023).

If the way you think others see you is in stark contrast to how others actually see you, you are in danger of derailing in your career.

Again with this database business?

Multiplicity of parts, variety, and unity of plan which combines the parts into a coherent whole, – such are the elements of order found in all beauty.

Continuing a rich conversation that sparked [BROKEN LINK: blog/a-real-life-example-of-database-design.pre-processed.org] [BROKEN LINK: blog/how-to-use-the-relational-model-to-do-database-design.pre-processed.org], I was asked to justify updateable views w…

In a followup to [BROKEN LINK: blog/how-to-use-the-relational-model-to-do-database-design.pre-processed.org], I was asked to provide an example to illustrate the point: Can you walk through a real life example of modelling, let’s say, a car (it’s always a…

On a recent exchange I was asked the following: … what you mean that you use the relation model to design?

Reification: the treatment of something abstract as a material or concrete thing, as in the following lines from Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach”: (Britannica 2018) The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds…

If you are involved in politics, as a voter or just as an office worker in an unfortunate situation, you would do well to remember this dictum: When a public figure tells you something that you want to hear, question his sincerity.

As a technologist I often hear variations of the following phrase in my industry: Do it because some FAANG(Fernando 2023) company did it.

How can we talk straight about a concept when the term that should signify it is equivocated all the time?

The law of identity ‘Whatever is, is.’

If you want to become a (better) leader, you should master the four essential characteristics for leaders: integrity, judgment, competence, and vision(Hogan and Kaiser 2005): Integrity.

The following are adapted from(Perry 2020), using a more database centric approach: Principle Implementation Idempotence Client side ids; Session ids Immutability Insert only DBMSes (system time in SQL 2016) Location independence Natural keys Versioning A…

Sometimes you stumble upon small insights that illuminate a good chunk of things.

A fully normalized database means one thing, and only one thing: your relations corresponds only one predicate under a given interpretation (i.e. your business rules).

These days I’m doing quite a lot of work in PostgreSql.

The human mind is limited in its capacity to understand complexity.

abstraction (n.)

I recently commented on how the book (Kleppmann 2017) is a dangerous book, due to a subtle error on how it defines data models.

… when you trade safety for performance, you may get neither.

I think its fair to say that one can significantly improve one’s chances of being materially successful in life by learning John Taylor Gatto’s 14 Themes of the Elite Private School Curriculum1: A theory of human nature (as embodied in history, philosophy,

A theme that I think is important to understand a lot of modernity and the IT sector in particular, is nominalism.1 So, what is Nominalism, and why does it matter?

Someone asked me about this, so I feel it might help people out there.

What could be more important for a technology company than great software?

It is hard to do science without proper definitions.

I have come across people claiming to fear being replaced by bots, specially chatGPT and other large language models (LLM).

In my view, Qubes OS lives up to its motto: A reasonably secure operating system.