Engineering Insights

Learning to summarize with human feedback

We’ve applied reinforcement learning from human feedback to train language models that are better at summarization.

On joining PlanetScale and the vision of open source database infrastructure

This is a personal account on why I joined PlanetScale to work on Vitess and PlanetScaleDB, and what I perceive Vitess can become in the MySQL open source ecosystem. Background I am a software engineer, drawn into the database world. I’ve been working with MySQL for two decades now, and am authoring or have authored various open source tools in the MySQL ecosystem: orchestrator for high availability, gh-ost for online schema migrations, freno for throttling and others. In the past decade I’ve wo

September 2020

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Monorepos

Vercel now supports monorepos for improved flexibility at scale. From the same Git repository, you can set up multiple projects to be built and deployed in parallel. Monorepos let your team use multiple programming languages and frameworks, collaborate better, and leverage microfrontend architectures. Learn more about how monoreops are changing how teams build software. Read more

Consensus algorithms at scale: Part 1 - Introduction

Be sure to follow along with this eight part series. You will find all posts in the series linked at the bottom of each article. Introduction Consensus algorithms in their theoretical and applied forms can be difficult to reason about. Often, these algorithms are solutions that have stumbled upon some good problems to solve. Unfortunately, the problems are evolving. And I don’t think these solutions are going to remain relevant much longer. Let’s start with defining the problems they solve: Dist

Node.js 14.9.0 (Current)

TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Prisma Backend | REST API, Validation, Testing

Build a REST API with TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Prisma, and Hapi, then add validation and tests for CRUD endpoints.

Learn Horizontal Scaling on PlanetScaleDB with Vitess — Rate Puppies in a Rust app with Sharded MySQL Database

Since writing this blog we have released a new version of PlanetScale. Learn more about what we’ve built and give it a try, and be sure to check out our docs. Please note, this blog refers to PlanetScaleDB v1 and is not applicable to our latest product. At PlanetScale, we have built PlanetScaleDB, a fully managed database-as-a-service on top of open source Vitess that enables horizontal scaling of MySQL far beyond what you can do with a single instance. In this blog, we’ll explain how sharding w