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Implementing Sharding in PostgreSQL: A Comprehensive Guide (Thu, 05 Mar 2026)
As applications scale and data volumes increase, efficiently managing large datasets becomes a core requirement. Sharding is a common approach used to achieve horizontal scalability by splitting a database into smaller, independent units known as shards. Each shard holds a portion of the overall data, making it easier to scale storage and workload across multiple servers. PostgreSQL, as a mature and feature-rich relational database, offers several ways to implement sharding. These approaches allow systems to handle high data volumes while maintaining performance, reliability, and operational stability. This guide explains how sharding can be implemented in PostgreSQL using practical examples and clear, step-by-step instructions.
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42% of AI Projects Collapse in 2025 — The Battle-Tested Framework Wall Street Uses (Thu, 05 Mar 2026)
1. The Context: AI’s ‘Wild West’ Problem In 2018, a chilling discovery was made within the tech giant Amazon. Its experimental AI recruiting tool, designed to streamline the hiring process by analyzing resumes, had developed a significant bias against women. The system, trained on a decade’s worth of hiring data, had learned to penalize resumes containing the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain,” and downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges. Amazon ultimately scrapped the project, but the incident served as a stark warning about the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence (Reuters, 2018). This was not an isolated event. A 2024 study by the University of Washington revealed significant racial and gender bias in how three state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) ranked job applicants’ names (University of Washington, 2024). These incidents highlight a critical vulnerability at the heart of the AI revolution: the lack of a standardized safety net. Unlike the aviation or banking industries, where rigorous safety protocols are mandated, the world of AI remains a Wild West, with companies often operating without the safeguards needed to prevent catastrophic failures. The solution is not necessarily more regulation or a halt to innovation, but rather the adaptation of a proven system from a seemingly unrelated field: the Three Lines of Defence (3LoD) (Schuett, 2023).
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Consensus in Distributed Systems: Understanding the Raft Algorithm (Thu, 05 Mar 2026)
Consider a group of friends planning a weekend outing. To make the trip successful, they need consensus on the location, schedule, and budget. Typically, one person is chosen as the leader — responsible for decisions, tracking expenses, and keeping everyone informed, including any new members who join later. If the leader steps down, the group elects another to maintain continuity. In distributed computing, clusters of servers face a similar challenge — they must agree on shared state and decisions. This is achieved through Consensus Protocols. Among the most well-known are Viewstamped Replication (VSR), Zookeeper Atomic Broadcast (ZAB), Paxos, and Raft. In this article, we will explore Raft — designed to be more understandable while ensuring reliability in distributed systems.
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Why “End-to-End” AI Will Always Need Deterministic Guardrails (Thu, 05 Mar 2026)
The "Long Tail" Is Longer Than You Think Imagine you are driving at night. Your headlights catch a figure ahead. It appears to be a large dog standing on a single wheel, moving at 10 mph. A human driver immediately processes this as: Ah, it's Halloween! It’s probably a kid in a Halloween dog costume riding their unicycle and going back home after their candy run. The driver then categorizes the “figure” as a human, gives them space, and navigates around them carefully.
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DevOps Cafe Podcast

DevOps Cafe Ep 79 - Guests: Joseph Jacks and Ben Kehoe (Mon, 13 Aug 2018)
Triggered by Google Next 2018, John and Damon chat with Joseph Jacks (stealth startup) and Ben Kehoe (iRobot) about their public disagreements — and agreements — about Kubernetes and Serverless. 
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DevOps Cafe Ep 78 - Guest: J. Paul Reed (Mon, 23 Jul 2018)
John and Damon chat with J.Paul Reed (Release Engineering Approaches) about the field of Systems Safety and Human Factors that studies why accidents happen and how to minimize the occurrence and impact. Show notes at http://devopscafe.org
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DevOps Cafe Ep. 77 - Damon interviews John (Wed, 20 Jun 2018)
A new season of DevOps Cafe is here. The topic of this episode is "DevSecOps." Damon interviews John about what this term means, why it matters now, and the overall state of security.  Show notes at http://devopscafe.org
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