Human Canaries: Remembering the Munitionettes
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Somewhere in your data platform right now, a single configuration property is quietly deciding a meaningful percentage of your storage bill, your query latency, and your compute spend. It is probably set to whatever the defaults were in 2019, nobody has looked at it since, and it is the compression codec. Compression is the most consequential invisible decision in data infrastructure. Every Parquet file in your lakehouse, every message crossing your network, every backup in your archive passed t
The question I get most often after talks, after podcast episodes, and in newsletter replies is a simple one: where do I start with your books? It is a fair question, because the library has grown. Between the O'Reilly and Manning flagships and the self-published series, there are now more than fifty titles at books.alexmerced.com, spanning the data lakehouse, AI engineering, economics and philosophy, and even fiction. That is wonderful for depth and terrible for a first-time visitor staring at
You can now see the number of active committers on repositories using GitHub Code Quality across your enterprise, giving you an estimate of your Code Quality license cost before it… The post GitHub Code Quality license estimate in public preview appeared first on The GitHub Blog.
Most enterprise security teams believe they have third party risk under control. They send out questionnaires, review SOC 2 reports, and negotiate vendor contracts. In the age of enterprise AI, this traditional approach is no longer enough. It is dangerously incomplete. The real risk has shifted from vendors to dependencies. We are moving away from legal agreements to neural weights, embeddings, retrieval pipelines, and agent frameworks. You can build a textbook Zero Trust architecture in AWS, b
Building a production AI agent in TypeScript with Mastra: a 2026 step-by-step. I spent an afternoon last month wiring up an AI agent in raw TypeScript using the Anthropic SDK directly. The code worked, but I owned every piece of it: the tool dispatch loop, the conversation history array, the retry logic. Around 400 lines before the agent did anything interesting. Mastra cuts that to about 60. A TypeScript-first agent framework with 24k+ GitHub stars, an active release cadence (88 releases as o
Most DR Drills Are Theater Someone schedules a meeting. A few senior engineers walk through a runbook. Everyone agrees "yes, we could do this" and marks it complete. Then the real disaster hits and nobody remembers the procedure, the runbook is 2 years out of date, and half the backup systems don't work. Real DR drills test whether your team can actually recover, not whether they can talk about recovery. Level 1: Tabletop Walk through a scenario on paper Identify missing runbooks Find ownershi
Is Next.js Really SEO-Friendly? Understanding SSG, SSR, ISR and CSR Thanks @opacedigitalagency for the valuable suggestion. While exploring this topic further, I researched how different rendering strategies in Next.js impact SEO, performance, and user experience. Many developers say: "Next.js is SEO-friendly by default." But the reality is more interesting. Next.js gives developers multiple rendering strategies, and the actual SEO benefits depend on choosing the right approach for the right t
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