I took a vacation this week, so I’m writing this weekly with more of a laid-back attitude.

Product Design

• Sometimes the product innovation is the distribution (Matt Webb): An interesting story about how Moleskine “hacked” into bookshop distribution and what it can mean for tech businesses in general.
• Ink & Switch: This independent research lab / design studio has put together some really thought-provoking proofs of concept.

Just plain fun

• Every UUID Dot Com: This gave me a chuckle. The writeup of how this got made is also worth a read.

Databases

• DSQL Vignette: Reads and Compute (Marc Brooker): Calling the SQL engine the “easy half of a database system” is certainly a choice, but this was an interesting look into a new database offering from AWS. I found this entry via Simon Willison, but it looks like the whole series is already posted on Marc’s blog. It seems like much of the secret sauce is in how “adjudicator” instances coordinate with each other, which unfortuantely isn’t discussed in the series.
• DELETEs are difficult (Radim Marek): The title kind of says it all. This was a deep dive into how row deletions are processed in Postgres and why they’re expensive.
• Turning Your Root URL Into a DuckDB Remote Database (Drew Breunig): A fun reminder that there’s other ways to experience the internet than in a Web browser. If I wasn’t running this blog as a static site on Netlify, this would be a fun thing to try out. Even so I might try embedding a SQLite database somewhere around here.