The Week When Boring Discipline Beat Magic

I published six articles this week. One about PostgreSQL. Another about AI agents. Another on context management. A tutorial on automation. An analysis of debugging. And an adversarial advice framework for evaluating MVPs. It wasn’t planned. Each article came from a paper, a talk, or a project that I found interesting individually. But looking at them together, there’s a common thread I hadn’t noticed while writing them. All six are saying the same thing. ...

March 11, 2026 · Fernando

OpenAI scales PostgreSQL for 800 million users with a single writer (no sharding)

Every time an article comes out about a large company’s infrastructure, half the Hacker News comments are variations of “of course they use Kubernetes with 47 microservices and a distributed database with custom consensus protocol.” And when it turns out they don’t—that they use plain PostgreSQL with a single primary and discipline—there’s an uncomfortable silence. That just happened with OpenAI. The numbers nobody expected Bohan Zhang, infrastructure engineer at OpenAI, published details about how they scale PostgreSQL for ChatGPT. The numbers: ...

March 11, 2026 · Fernando