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b-man

3,903 karma · joined June 14, 2009

Believer in individual freedom and debugging.

ebellani -at- gmail -dot- com

http://github.com/ebellani/

submissionscomments
b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2026)

  Location: EST
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes (US preferred)
  Technologies: PostgreSQL (partitioning, performance, OLTP architecture), SQL, F#, C#, C, Java, Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Python, Ruby, AWS, Linux
  Email: ebellani at gmail
I work on high-throughput database systems, especially when they’ve grown into a state where migrations, performance, or schema design have become limiting factors.

Recent work, using AI extensively:

- maintain a chat bot that can use psychometrics to adapt messages. - construct/evaluate a generic data warehouse based on deep knowlodge of AWS and DBMS

Weirly enough, I got an anthropic certification after all that.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where expertise on data is core to the business and performance/architecture matters.

Résumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-bellani/

b-man··on The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education
This particular system is predicated on people actually doing the homework.

There were threats on 'cheating', but the system is failing at detecting the new 'cheating' mechanism.

I use quotes because what is being cheated at is the certification, not education. Mixing them into the same pipeline was always a mistake.

BTW: A tutor is a person. An AI is a search engine.

b-man··on PostgreSQL for Everything
if you are searching for something similar but with more meat: https://ebellani.github.io/blog/2026/all-you-need-is-postgre...
b-man··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2026)
your job page is dead, btw
b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)

  Location: Brazil (UTC-3, overlaps US hours)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to Relocate: Yes (US preferred)
  Technologies: SQL Server, DBT, SQL Mesh, PostgreSQL, SQL, OLTP & OLAP, cloud optimization, query optimization, large-table migrations, F#, Clojure, Python, C#, C, Java, Ruby, Rust, Prolog, OCaml, Haskell
  Email: ebellani at gmail
I specialize in rescuing and scaling PostgreSQL systems that have become bottlenecks due to schema debt, growth, or operational complexity. Recent work: re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) handling 200+ writes/sec, improving scalability and reducing application-level complexity. My work focuses on high-risk database migrations, dangerous schema remediation, hot-path optimization, and making existing systems scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where data is central and performance matters.

b-man··on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
related: https://pgdog.dev/blog/scaling-postgres-listen-notify
b-man··on Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
I think your post misses the point of the DBMS centralization: managed consistency.

It is not about ops cost in infrastructure, but ops cost in debugging consistency errors.

b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2026)

  Location: Brazil (UTC-3, overlaps US hours)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to Relocate: Yes (US preferred)
  Technologies: SQL Server, DBT, SQL Mesh, PostgreSQL, SQL, OLTP & OLAP, cloud optimization, query optimization, large-table migrations, F#, Clojure, Python, C#, C, Java, Ruby, Rust, Prolog, OCaml, Haskell
  Email: ebellani at gmail
I specialize in rescuing and scaling PostgreSQL systems that have become bottlenecks due to schema debt, growth, or operational complexity. Recent work: re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) handling 200+ writes/sec, improving scalability and reducing application-level complexity.

My work focuses on high-risk database migrations, dangerous schema remediation, hot-path optimization, and making existing systems scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where data is central and performance matters.

b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)

  Location: Brazil (UTC-3, overlaps US hours)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to Relocate: Yes (US preferred)
  Technologies: SQL Server, DBT, SQL Mesh, PostgreSQL, SQL, OLTP & OLAP, cloud optimization, query optimization, large-table migrations, F#, Clojure, Python, C#, C, Java, Ruby, Rust, Prolog, OCaml, Haskell
  Email: ebellani at gmail
I specialize in rescuing and scaling PostgreSQL systems that have become bottlenecks due to schema debt, growth, or operational complexity.

Recent work: re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) handling 200+ writes/sec, improving scalability and reducing application-level complexity.

My work focuses on high-risk database migrations, dangerous schema remediation, hot-path optimization, and making existing systems scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where data is central and performance matters.

b-man··on Where is the AI jobs crisis?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WPjJ
b-man··on Coalton is an efficient, statically typed Lisp with ideas from Haskell and OCaml
have you tried just using emacs? They have an emacs mode https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton-labs
b-man··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
Great refs. I think one can find more accessible sources for this knowledge, for instance this course:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoYRQl2t0w0EjRIb9Jr1y...

or Feser's articles such as

- https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/04/kurzweils-phanta...

- https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig...

b-man··on Casus Belli Engineering
> The Agile example makes this worse, not better. Yes, Agile was overhyped and badly implemented in many places. But using that to indict the entire movement as Girardian ritual is precisely the logical move the author claims to be critiquing: take some real failures, blame them on a paradigm rather than specific implementations, declare the whole thing rotten. He scapegoats Agile to validate his theory about scapegoating

I don't think the author did that at all. He was fair to interactive development. He specifically points out the scapegoating of waterfall, where the methodology was misrepresented in order to create the space for agile.

b-man··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026)
fwiw, your career page seems broken (https://supabase.com/careers)
b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)

   Location: EST
   Remote: Yes 
   Willing to relocate: Yes (US preferred)
   Technologies: PostgreSQL (partitioning, performance, OLTP architecture), SQL, F#, C#, C, Java, Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Python, Ruby, AWS, Linux
   Email: ebellani at gmail
I work on high-throughput systems, especially when they’ve grown into a state where migrations, performance, or schema design have become limiting factors.

Recent work:

Re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) receiving 200+ writes/sec. I focus on “rescue architecture” work: fixing dangerous schemas, stabilizing hot paths, removing app-level complexity, and making Postgres scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where data is core to the business and performance/architecture matters.

Résumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-bellani/ https://ebellani.github.io/

b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)
ocation: EST Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes (US preferred) Technologies: PostgreSQL (partitioning, performance, OLTP architecture), SQL, F#, C#, C, Java, Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Python, Ruby, AWS, Linux

Email: ebellani at gmail

I work on high-throughput PostgreSQL systems, especially when they’ve grown into a state where migrations, performance, or schema design have become limiting factors.

Recent work:

Re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) receiving 200+ writes/sec. I focus on “rescue architecture” work: fixing dangerous schemas, stabilizing hot paths, removing app-level complexity, and making Postgres scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where Postgres is core to the business and performance/architecture matters.

Résumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-bellani/ https://ebellani.github.io/

b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)
Location: EST Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes (US preferred)

Technologies: PostgreSQL (partitioning, performance, OLTP architecture), SQL, F#, C#, C, Java, Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Python, Ruby, AWS, Linux

Email: ebellani at gmail

I work on high-throughput PostgreSQL systems, especially when they’ve grown into a state where migrations, performance, or schema design have become limiting factors.

Recent work:

Re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) receiving 200+ writes/sec. I focus on “rescue architecture” work: fixing dangerous schemas, stabilizing hot paths, removing app-level complexity, and making Postgres scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where Postgres is core to the business and performance/architecture matters.

Résumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-bellani/ https://ebellani.github.io/

b-man··on The Lost Art of XML
> This is the reason for the push-back against it.

Do you have evidence for that? From memory, it was basically because it was associated with the java/.net bloat from the early 2000s. Then ruby on rails came.

b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)
Location: EST Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (US preferred)

Technologies: PostgreSQL (partitioning, performance, OLTP architecture), SQL, F#, C#, C, Java, Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Python, Ruby, AWS, Linux

Email: ebellani at gmail

I work on high-throughput PostgreSQL systems, especially when they’ve grown into a state where migrations, performance, or schema design have become limiting factors.

Recent work:

Re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) receiving 200+ writes/sec. I focus on “rescue architecture” work: fixing dangerous schemas, stabilizing hot paths, removing app-level complexity, and making Postgres scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where Postgres is core to the business and performance/architecture matters.

Résumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-bellani/ https://ebellani.github.io/

b-man··on The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know
I have written the entire backend of a fintech using nothing but postgresql, integration over http and webhook receival included (the last bit was with postgrest, but you get the point)
b-man··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)
Location: EST

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (US preferred)

Technologies: PostgreSQL (partitioning, performance, OLTP architecture), SQL, F#, C#, C, Java, Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Python, Ruby, AWS, Linux

Email: ebellani at gmail

I work on high-throughput PostgreSQL systems, especially when they’ve grown into a state where migrations, performance, or schema design have become limiting factors.

Recent work:

Re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) receiving 200+ writes/sec. I focus on “rescue architecture” work: fixing dangerous schemas, stabilizing hot paths, removing app-level complexity, and making Postgres scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where Postgres is core to the business and performance/architecture matters.

Résumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-bellani/ https://ebellani.github.io/

b-man··on Cloudflare outage should not have happened
> Not to mention that perfectly normalizing a database always incurs join overhead that limits horizontal scalability. In fact, denormalization is required to achieve scale (with a trade-off).

This is just not true, at least not in general. Inserting on a normalized design is usually faster, due to smaller index sizes, fewer indexes and fitting more rows per page.

b-man··on Cloudflare outage should not have happened
fixed
b-man··on Cloudflare outage should not have happened
Indeed. I was trying to make that point on my concluding paragraph.
b-man··on Cloudflare outage should not have happened
> That may be. What's not specified there is the immense, immense cost of driving a dev org on those terms

I'm happy that we agree on the solution, but disagree only if it is cost worthy. About the cost, I took that into consideration when I wrote the conclusion:

> FAANG-style companies are unlikely to adopt formal methods or relational rigor wholesale. But for their most critical systems, they should. It’s the only way to make failures like this impossible by design, rather than just less likely.

There is an actionable plan in the article. It is possible to run teams like these. It is an economical decision of upper management to run the risk of having these outages vis-a-vis this alternative.

b-man··on Cloudflare outage should not have happened
a fully normalized relation is one where the SQL (say) table in question represents one and only one predicate of your business rules.

It is literally impossible for that to be done automatically. Someone needs to look at the resulting code and confirm that that was the case.

b-man··on Cloudflare outage should not have happened
Normalization cannot be done by machines, because it depends on expressing the (and only the) predicate that corresponds to the business rule in question.

It requires apprehending the essence of the situation, something a machine cannot do.

b-man··on Google Cloud's outage wasn't a testing failure but a design flaw
btw, I do reference an article that is rich in experiences of formal verification: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624728
b-man··on Google Cloud's outage wasn't a testing failure but a design flaw
Is it more expensive? The answer depends on the criticality of the component.

In this case in particular, having a 'not null' directive on the table at hand would have suffice. And that is something everyone can do.

b-man··on The principles of database design, or, the Truth is out there
what you need is to add temporality to your tables. Then your logs/dependencies will work just fine
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