This year I have taken a few long train rides across Europe, such as Berlin to Amsterdam. I found that these need a bit more preparation than the typical short flights within Europe, so here’s a(n incomplete) checklist for these trips: Gear: Dress comfortably. Take noise cancelling headphones. Take multiple charging cables. Some companies just rolled out USB-A ports, so I would definitely take one both a USB-A and a USB-C cable for phones....

Following the recent retirement of KùzuDB, I published an updated version of my Graph Databases slide deck. I originally presented this back in February at FOSDEM 2025. Now I updated it with new systems such as KùzuDB’s fork, LadybugDB....

In the last decade, I had my fair share of bad sleep. Often, I pushed through it helpless and the usual tips – aim for a regular bedtime, stop caffeine intake mid-afternoon, reduce screen time in the evening – did not help much. However, over the years I built up a repertoire of techniques. This is obviously not medical advice. All I can say that if you’re struggling with bad sleep, I encourage you to experiment....

I recently discovered the typos command line tool and created the following workflow around it in Git repositories: typos -w # writes the changes to file git add -p # allows you to review the changes interactively Some git clients use line-based diffs, which make the differences difficult to see. In these cases, you may want to switch to the diff-highlight tool, which is shipped with Git. On macOS with Apple Silicon and a Brew-installed git, you can use these commands to make git use it:...

I recently attended SIGMOD and chatted with people in the data management and graph processing communities. These conversations and other interactions led me to come up with a few research ideas. I lack the time to actively pursue them, but I list them below for future reference. If you are working on something similar or would like to collaborate, please drop me a line! Single-node LDBC Datagen: I have long thought about developing a single-node variant of the LDBC Datagen....

I moved to the Netherlands during the summer of 2020 — about five years ago. Over time, I’ve learned about a bunch of useful cards and apps that make everyday life easier. Here’s a brief collection of them. Cards Albert Heijn Bonuskaart: When shopping at the Albert Heijn supermarket, you need to scan the bonus card; otherwise, the discounts are not applied. A few years ago, it was quite easy to get an anonymous card (just ask for one and don’t register it — the card still works as intended)....

A lot of things happened in the graph space so far. Here’s a quick summary with a few comments. On DB Engines ranking, graph databases have continued their rebound and have been on a growth trajectory for the last 5 months. In 2021, Gartner predicted that “by 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations, up from 10% in 2021, facilitating rapid decision making across the organization”....

Being Glue by Tanya Reilly How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read by Michael Lynch Reality has a surprising amount of detail by John Salvatier The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton Cottagecore Programmers by Theodore Morley The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication by Simon Willison I Regret My $46k Website Redesign by Michael Lynch ...

Some regular expressions for catching typical writing errors – spelling issues (US spelling), repeat words, etc.: ag --md " a [aeioAEIO]" ag --md " an [bcdfghjklmnpqrstvxzwyBCDGHJKPQRTVWXYZ]" ag --md -i "\s\b(\w+) +\1\b" ag --md -i "\s\b(\w+ +\w+) +\1\b" ag --md '\w+isation\b' ag --md 'e\.g\. ' ag --md 'i\.e\. ' ...

In 2025, both top-tier database conferences will be in Europe: SIGMOD in Berlin (June 22–27) and VLDB in London (September 1–5). There are quite a few papers and satellite events I am looking forward to – I listed them below. SIGMOD 2025 The papers presented at SIGMOD are listed on the website: research track, industry track. Update: the detailed programme is out! Keynotes: How to Build a Brain by Christos H....