Rootconf

Talking to database people is such a breath of fresh air amidst all this AI chaos :) For the last one hour, I was talking to Joran (@jorandirkgreef), the creator of TigerBeetle DB, and he shared a great way to think about infrastructure code. The total cost of ownership of an infrastructure component like a database is very low relative to the value it delivers. The number of people using it is huge, and the lifetime of this code is also very long. So even if you spend a year handcrafting it, it can be totally worth it. The world will keep using it for a very long time, provided it is good. Infrastructure is not just an expense or throwaway code. It is an asset. He also shared a beautiful line that I will be reusing a lot: "The database is the last bastion of software craft." In fact, last week, I rebuilt MongoDB in Rust and got 4x storage savings, 3x faster performance, 100% compatibility, and blah blah blah... But I had no confidence in what it actually did (even when tests passed) because I do not fully understand the codebase of something that will be mission critical. The person building a database needs to be highly confident in what it does, how it works, and why it works that way; hence, the craft. We spoke about so much more, but this is the part I thought would be most useful to share with you all. Hope this helps.