I recently re-ran the experiments of “Big Data on the Move: DuckDB on the Framework Laptop 13” on Windows. For this, I installed Windows 11 on the laptop, which turned out to be trickier than I initially envisioned. So here are my notes for the installation. Booting up Create a Windows installer USB stick e.g. with Balena Etcher During boot, press F2 and pick Administer Secure Boot Go to the Boot Manager and add the ....

“Benchmarking gone wrong”, one of the best and funniest benchmark talks I’ve ever come across – it’s well worth 6 minutes to watch it....

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 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 ...