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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When we invested in 10gen last year, the team was working on a very ambitious approach to deliver an integrated cloud platform a la Google App Engine. While they made amazing progress on that, it turned out that developer interest was focused around the MongoDB datastore. Instead of having to buy into a complete stack, most folks (at least for now) want to continue using a broad choice of technologies and combine elements as they see fit. This appears to be one of the key factors in the tremendous continued uptake of Amazon’s EC2 and AWS offerings compared to Google App Engine. The 10gen team therefore decided to focus all their efforts on the MongoDB datastore and I am excited that they delivered an initial standalone release earlier this month.
Who should try MongoDB? Everybody building new web sites or services or operating existing ones. Mongo is an operational datastore, which means that it is aimed at the data that powers the interactions with the site or service (as opposed to say analytics). The team has a more detailed description of the possible use cases for MongoDB and also sets out some areas that it is less well suited for.
Why should you try out MongoDB? Because MongoDB is a much better fit for most web development than a traditional relational database. Instead of requiring an ORM layer, MongoDB simply stores objects as documents in the database. This is very fast since it eliminates a lot of overhead and therefore scales much better than a relational DB+ORM. Yet it retains all the flexibility for super agile development. Need a new field in your objects? Just start saving new objects with that field. Need a new collection of objects? Just start saving to it!
You could get that kind of performance and flexibility with a
When we invested in 10gen last year, the team was working on a very ambitious approach to deliver an integrated cloud platform a la Google App Engine. While they made amazing progress on that, it turned out that developer interest was focused around the MongoDB datastore. Instead of having to buy into a complete stack, most folks (at least for now) want to continue using a broad choice of technologies and combine elements as they see fit. This appears to be one of the key factors in the tremendous continued uptake of Amazon’s EC2 and AWS offerings compared to Google App Engine. The 10gen team therefore decided to focus all their efforts on the MongoDB datastore and I am excited that they delivered an initial standalone release earlier this month.
Who should try MongoDB? Everybody building new web sites or services or operating existing ones. Mongo is an operational datastore, which means that it is aimed at the data that powers the interactions with the site or service (as opposed to say analytics). The team has a more detailed description of the possible use cases for MongoDB and also sets out some areas that it is less well suited for.
Why should you try out MongoDB? Because MongoDB is a much better fit for most web development than a traditional relational database. Instead of requiring an ORM layer, MongoDB simply stores objects as documents in the database. This is very fast since it eliminates a lot of overhead and therefore scales much better than a relational DB+ORM. Yet it retains all the flexibility for super agile development. Need a new field in your objects? Just start saving new objects with that field. Need a new collection of objects? Just start saving to it!
You could get that kind of performance and flexibility with a
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...
Share Dialog
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