Welcome to Weekly 29, six days after Weekly 28! Crazy how that works. I’m back in the Pinboarding habit, which means we have a full and fresh newsletter this week!

Distributed Systems

• Why Strong Consistency? (Marc Brooker): Distributed systems engineers often talk about the how and skim over the why. I appreciated Marc’s explanation of why strong consistency is a useful property of a database as a user even if it might be difficult to maintain.

AI

• Compressed Filesystems á la Language Models (Rohan Gupta): This post blew my mind. Everyone normally thinks LLM inference as text generation rather than the more fundamental probability distribution that these models can produce. I’d heard about arithmetic coding before, but seeing it used in practice to turn a probability distribution into compression was really awesome.

• Val Town 2023-2025 Retrospective (Tom MacWright): Tons of startups were pressured by their investors over the past few years to integrate AI into their offerings. This is a wider retrospective (and some sneaky content marketing for open job positions), but I found it particularly interesting how Tom talks about Townie, Val Town’s AI coding assistant. Townie was a huge driver of user growth, but is also expensive to run. Moving it to a premium feature made it pay for itself, but then it’s no longer as much of a growth driver. Cutting through the hype bubble, it was a small window into the realities of building a VC-funded startup that hasn’t gone all-in on an AI pivot in the current era.

Organizations

• How good engineers write bad code at big companies (Sean Goedecke): Understanding organizations of almost any size is all about understanding incentives. Sean provides an in-depth explanation of how larger tech companies can push engineers towards mediocrity.

• What They Don’t Tell You About Maintaining an Open Source Project (Andrej Acevski): This was the most positive view of open source authorship and contribution that I’ve read in a while. It can be easy to get intimidated by the mountain of work that ineveitably piles up as an open source maintainer, but Andrej gets motivated rather than intimidated by the users that are attracted to a good service. More power to him! I hope he’s able to monetize it at some point, though — open source maintainer-ship is a fulltime job, and it shouldn’t have to be your second one!

• Size Matters (Alex Kladov): I’m skeptical of organizations that just grab Google’s style guide without thinking hard about why style matters. Alex zooms in on file/module size here, articulating some deep-held intuitions.