Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...

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Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...

Intent-based Collaboration Environments
AI Native IDEs for Code, Engineering, Science
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
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Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote a post titled “I Want a New Platform” which led to our investment in MongoDB. At the time the company was called 10gen and had developed a Platform as a Service: a Javascript application server with a built in database. It turned out that we were ahead of the times (this was before Google App Engine and before Node). People wanted infrastructure as a service and AWS grew by leaps and bounds. 10gen found little adoption until the team decided to mothball the application server and make the database available separately. From there on MongoDB experienced rapid growth.
That history is why I am particularly thrilled about the release of MongoDB’s Stitch service today at MongoDB World. Stitch is Backend as a Service for web and mobile apps. What makes Stitch special is that it seamlessly integrates MongoDB with services such as Twilio and Slack using a declarative approach. This dramatically reduces how much glue code needs to be written, enables reuse of Stitch pipelines, and provides autoscaling. All while giving you complete MongoDB based access to and manipulation of your data and even handling user authentication (including access controls based on that authentication).
Getting up and running with Stitch is super fast and there is a free plan. I used a pre-release version to build a system for texting reminders to myself. I was able to build the whole thing in Stitch using MongoDB and Twilio with only a couple of declarative pipelines and zero custom code. Go and give it a whirl!
Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote a post titled “I Want a New Platform” which led to our investment in MongoDB. At the time the company was called 10gen and had developed a Platform as a Service: a Javascript application server with a built in database. It turned out that we were ahead of the times (this was before Google App Engine and before Node). People wanted infrastructure as a service and AWS grew by leaps and bounds. 10gen found little adoption until the team decided to mothball the application server and make the database available separately. From there on MongoDB experienced rapid growth.
That history is why I am particularly thrilled about the release of MongoDB’s Stitch service today at MongoDB World. Stitch is Backend as a Service for web and mobile apps. What makes Stitch special is that it seamlessly integrates MongoDB with services such as Twilio and Slack using a declarative approach. This dramatically reduces how much glue code needs to be written, enables reuse of Stitch pipelines, and provides autoscaling. All while giving you complete MongoDB based access to and manipulation of your data and even handling user authentication (including access controls based on that authentication).
Getting up and running with Stitch is super fast and there is a free plan. I used a pre-release version to build a system for texting reminders to myself. I was able to build the whole thing in Stitch using MongoDB and Twilio with only a couple of declarative pipelines and zero custom code. Go and give it a whirl!
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