Jordi Villar

Imagine you join a new project with a clear goal, improve ClickHouse performance, so our biggest customers can run their queries in a reasonable amount of time.

You should never be angry at work — The line that got me was “you are not Linus Torvalds or Bryan Cantrill”, because the famous angry engineers can afford anger only since they already control the decisions, and that’s not the position most of us are argu…

Git at any scale — The move that stuck with me is putting a write-ahead log in S3 as the source of truth and treating the local NVMe repos as a warm cache you can throw away.

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more than ever — The welding analogy is the part I keep coming back to, he learned to build things in his 20s that he couldn’t lift or get out the door of the shop, and the lesson was that how something goes togeth…

Abdominal Fat Predicts Heart Disease Risk Better Than BMI - American College of Cardiology — The number that stuck with me is that people classified as normal weight by BMI still carried 15 to 50% higher risk across most outcomes if their waist-to-hip rat…

Elevators — The counterintuitive result is that destination dispatch, the kiosk where you punch your floor before boarding, performs worse than plain up/down buttons.

GPT 5.6 Sol Ran a Real Business—and Lost $447 — The part that stuck with me isn’t the zero revenue or the users going from 61 to 66, it’s how the agent got there.

Appaji - Software Engineer — The detail that got me is that you didn’t even need to run anything.

@clickhouse/rowbinary: when your library is also a parser compiler — The framing that stuck with me is that the compiler here is the LLM itself.

Ten years of ClickHouse in open source — The detail that stuck is the monthly drill where they deliberately shut down a datacenter to force the system to survive it.

Building race telemetry for a ’92 Honda Accord — The RPM measurement bug is the part I keep thinking about.

There Are No Instances in atproto — overreacted — The RSS analogy is what makes the whole thing click.

Software Is Made Between Commits — The claim that stuck with me: “the conversation that generates the code is becoming the true source of our software.”

A few weeks ago I read Modal’s post on truly serverless GPUs.

We’ve made the world too complicated — The piece names something I keep circling back to — most of us operate daily within systems we can’t meaningfully inspect.

I never really thought about how Shazam works.

I used to roll my eyes at people who started a new sport and immediately bought all the gear.

The Singularity Will Not Be Streamed — What makes this story land is the contrast.

These days I’ve found myself reading about hardware shortage and how RAM, disk, and NAND manufacturers have all their production for 2026 already sold to AI/Data center companies.

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity — The Engineer A vs Engineer B comparison is painfully recognizable.

Hedonism and Entrepreneurship in Barcelona — A potential acquisition dies because a vegan exec unknowingly eats mayo on patatas bravas.

I worked at Tinybird for 4 years, 2 months, and 21 days.

My AI Adoption Journey — The most practical thing here is the “reproduce your own work” phase: doing tasks manually and then redoing them with agents.

Automatic Programming — The distinction antirez makes here finally gave me language for something I’ve been fumbling with.

I’m addicted to being useful — This hit close.

My entire strategy is to do the work only I can do.

Distinguishing yourself early in your career as a developer — Honestly?

How uv got so fast — This one hit different because everyone’s been saying “uv is fast because Rust” but the real story is way more interesting.

Last year I wrote about hitting 130 hours of working out.

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life — This hit different.

SQLite JSON Superpower: Virtual Columns + Indexing — This is one of those “why didn’t I know about this sooner?”

I’ve been following CMU’s 15-445/645 Database Systems course lately, trying to fill some gaps in my low-level systems knowledge.

Surviving Long-Running Projects — A nice reality check on how grueling big projects can be.

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive — AI does not make engineers ten times more productive because much of coding involves thinking, reading, and preventing unnecessary work.

It feels silly to write just another blogpost about how to transition to a leadership role.

Thrive in obscurity — Creative success often starts in obscurity, with many creators spending years sharing their work with few or no viewers.

Original article: https://www.tinybird.co/blog-posts/query-booster-how-tinybird-optimizes-table-schemas-for-you A customer recently reached out to us with an interesting observation: their query latency had mysteriously dropped without any manual interven…

What If We Made Advertising Illegal?

Less ceremony, more shipping — Tinybird introduces their new deployment tool, which simplifies data schema changes for teams.

It’s been a while since the last time I published a post with the list of articles I’ve read.

For the last few years, especially after the pandemic forced us to switch to remote work, I’ve been searching for ways to break free from a stressful, sedentary lifestyle.

Let’s get real for a moment.

I’ve never been enthusiastic about the AI revolution.

So You Want To Build A Browser Engine — This article goes deep into all the complicated things involved in making a browser engine.

Zed Decoded: Rope & SumTree — The Zed team explained how they use B+Tree (or SumTree) to deal with file content in their text editor.

What Makes You You?

I’ve never invested much time in understanding how operating systems work.

It’s quite common to find folks sharing papers on minor breakthroughs in areas like NLP, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and related fields here.

Original post: https://www.tinybird.co/blog-posts/clickhouse-lock-contention This is a story about completely saturating a ClickHouse replica (and being happy about it).

Across all my professional experiences, SQL has been always an important tool.