2025-06-28 08:00:00
I have been blogging consistently since 2017. And one of my goals in speaking publicly was always to connect with like-minded people. I always left my email and hoped people would get in touch. Even while my blog and twitter became popular, passing 1M views and 20k followers, I basically never had people get in touch to chat or meet up.
So it felt kind of ridiculous when last November I started charging people $100 to chat. I mean, who am I? But people started showing up fairly immediately. Now granted the money did not go to me. It went to an education non-profit and I merely received the receipt.
And at this point I've met a number of interesting people, from VCs to business professors to undergraduate students to founders and everyone in between. People wanting to talk about trends in databases, about how to succeed as a programmer, about marketing for developers, and so on. Women and men thoughout North America, Europe, Africa, New Zealand, India, Nepal, and so on. And I've raised nearly $6000 for educational non-profits.
How is it that you go from giving away your time for free and getting no hits to charging and almost immediately getting results? For one, every person responded very positively to it being a fundraiser. It also helps me be entirely shameless about sharing on social media every single time someone donates; because it's such a positive thing.
But also I think that in "charging" for my time it helps people feel more comfortable about actually taking my time, especially when we have never met. It gives you a reasonable excuse to take time from an internet rando.
On the other hand, a lot of people come for advice and I think giving advice is pretty dangerous, especially since my background is not super conventional. I try to always frame things as just sharing my opinion and my perspective and that they should talk with many others and not take my suggestions without consideration.
And there's also the problem that by charging everyone for my time now, I'm no longer available to people who could maybe use it the most. I do mention on my page that I will still take calls from people who don't donate, as my schedule allows. But to be honest I feel less incentivized to spend time when people do not donate. So I guess this is an issue with the program.
But I mitigated even this slightly, and significantly jump-started the program, during my 30th birthday when I took calls with any person who donated at least $30.
Anyway, I picked this path because I have wanted to get involved with helping students figure out their lives and careers. But without a degree I am literally unqualified for many volunteering programs. And I always found the time commitments for non-profits painful.
So until starting this I figured it wouldn't be until I retire that I find some way to make a difference. But ultimately I kept meeting people who were starting their own non-profits now or donated significantly to help students. Peer pressure. I wanted to do my part now. And 30 minutes of my time in return for a donation receipt has been an easy trade.
While only raising a humble $6,000 to date, the Chat for Education program has been more successful than I imagined. I've met many amazing people through it. And it's something that should be easy to keep up indefinitely.
I hope to meet you through it too!
I wrote about trying to meet like-minded people and fundraising for educational non-profits. pic.twitter.com/UJ9U6DIHGU
— Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) June 28, 2025
2025-06-21 08:00:00
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2025-05-26 08:00:00
At work we're so absorbed in the difficulties we face that it becomes easy to forget what we appreciate and what we value in our coworkers. On social media we can be so focused on our own work that we forget to interact with others'.
I have heard so many times from founders that they switch between heads down building, disappearing from the community, and then pop up to talk about what they've built. Engineers often say the exact same thing. This kills me. Though I probably still do it to a degree too.
The easiest way for no one to give a shit about what you've done is for you to only interact at periodic intervals that are only convenient for you.
With networking in general the most important time to interact and build relationships is when you do not need anything. By the time you want someone's support or you want someone to care about what you've done it is way too late to start building a relationship.
One of the cheapest and most effective avenues to build genuine relationships is to be the biggest cheerleader you can be.
At work this means when someone writes a fantastic blog post you call it out in a public channel. It means when a coworker's work is featured somewhere you call this out in a public channel. At least, this is what I do at work.
I don't care that I have no leadership role or haven't met these people before. If I see something amazing that I'd like to see more of, I mention it in public and praise the person.
Or when someone shares work they've done in a public channel, you hit all the emojis and you reply "that's awesome".
On social media this means engaging seriously and (more) deeply with what people post. If the default behavior on social media is to passively observe, engaging more deeply can be liking a post. If you already show support through liking, engaging more deeply can be commenting or asking questions or (kindly) pointing out mistakes.
Engagement is a spectrum. Genuine engagement consistently over time builds genuine relationships.
I would not suggest that you do this without feeling it, or I'd rather only encourage you to respond to the degree that you feel. But I personally do feel so strongly when I cheer people on.
So much of life and work is drudgery such that when you see something positive, someone taking initiative, someone with talent or potential doing something with their skills, how can you not feel an overwhelming urge to cheer them on and hope to see more of it? Hope to see it develop?
What's more, I want to be around people who are trying new things and improving themselves. I want to be around people who celebrate. So I in turn try new things and work to improve myself and I celebrate the people around me.
This energy is infectious. And I genuinely think even a single person in a group celebrating publicly changes the group dynamic.
And I don't expect people to reciprocate in the same way or to the same degree that I show support. I'm particularly weird and confident and vocal. But if my cheerleading for some person seems like a complete sink then I'll not continue it and invest my time and energy elsewhere.
Not everybody needs my support and that's ok! It is better that it's spent where it's most needed. There were people who used to cheer me on who don't much anymore and that's totally fine, I still have positive feelings for them for the time they did cheer me on.
Cheerleading electrifies the work atmosphere. It is the proper use of social media. Cheerleading is the imperative of caring individuals as they become more experienced, gain confidence, command a wider audience, and want to continue their own growth through the development of genuine and supportive networks.
And an ambitious, high-achieving, celebratory culture is simply the most fun to be a part of.
I wrote a post on being a cheerleader. pic.twitter.com/mESNjSjQ0n
— Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) May 26, 2025
2025-05-22 08:00:00
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2025-04-22 08:00:00
I've been a developer, a manager, a cofounder, and now I'm a developer again. I ran away from each position until being a founder because I felt like I was limited by what I was allowed to do.
But I reached an enlightment of sorts during my career progression: that everyone around me was dying for someone to pick things up, for employees to show engagement and agency.
We think of our titles as our limits. We're quick to say and believe, "that isn't my job". While in reality titles reflect the minimum expected of us, not the maximum that is open to us.
Trying to figure out what (new minimum) you must do to get promoted seems kind of backwards to me, reinforcing our sense of our own limits. Instead, at every stage in your career, focus on doing the intersection of:
And this is the path to promotion and a successful and interesting career.
Burn your title. Burn your job description. I mean, keep your boss happy for sure. Keep your teammates happy by supporting them and building them up and communicating well. But don't wait to be officially made a lead or given a new title to do what otherwise fits into that intersection above.
And if after doing this for some time, demonstrating this level of agency, you are not promoted, it just means you're not at the right company or right organization within your company and you should look elsewhere.
What's more, this work you did (at a company that doesn't appreciate your agency, if that happens to be the case) merely makes the case stronger for your successful interview at the next company. There's no downside.
The cynical, and perhaps realistic, alternative to this is to do politics to get promoted. Or to not do politics but to do things that don't align with your long-term goals. I'm not personally interested in either path so I'm not covering them here. I'm interested in the intersection of things that move me in the direction I want, things that are useful to the company, and things that I am capable of doing (in addition to whatever minimum work I must actually do).
Here's a peek at what this looks like for me as an individual contributor, a programmer, at EnterpriseDB.
I started the EDB Engineering Newsletter because it seemed like we needed to do a better job telling the world the awesome things our engineering team is doing. (You know we're one of the biggest contributors to Postgres? Bruce Momjian, Robert Haas, Peter Eisentraut, etc. work here? The guy who implemented the WAL and MVCC in Postgres is my teammate?) Nobody asked me to do that.
I started publishing blog views for the entire company once a month internally. Nobody asked me to do that.
I wrote a number of internal docs and tutorials on the product because we were just obviously missing them. Nobody asked me to do that.
I started a fortnightly incident review meeting for my team because it seemed like we were missing chances to update docs and teach each other. Nobody asked me to do that.
I write a odd posts for the company blog on what I've learned. Nobody asked me to do that.
These are just a few of the random things that seemed like a good idea for me to do on top of my Actual Work as a developer, which I think I do a decent job of on its own.
Don't burn out. Don't do things you aren't asked for and don't find rewarding. Or that won't pave the way toward the career you want. I'm trying to be very careful not to advocate anything along those lines.
But also don't wait to be asked to do something. Do what is interesting and obvious and rewarding to you. Interesting opportunities seem to come most reliably when you make them for yourself.
Burn your title pic.twitter.com/4bQRPMX4EZ
— Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) April 22, 2025
2025-04-20 08:00:00
Transactions are not an intrinsic part of a storage system. Any storage system can be made transactional: Redis, S3, the filesystem, etc. Delta Lake and Orleans demonstrated techniques to make S3 (or cloud storage in general) transactional. Epoxy demonstrated techniques to make Redis (and any other system) transactional. And of course there's always good old Two-Phase Commit.
If you don't want to read those papers, I wrote about a simplified implementation of Delta Lake and also wrote about a simplified MVCC implementation over a generic key-value storage layer.
It is both the beauty and the burden of transactions that they are not intrinsic to a storage system. Postgres and MySQL and SQLite have transactions. But you don't need to use them. It isn't possible to require you to use transactions. Many developers, myself a few years ago included, do not know why you should use them. (Hint: read Designing Data Intensive Applications.)
And you can take it even further by ignoring the transaction layer of an existing transactional database and implement your own transaction layer as Convex has done (the Epoxy paper above also does this). It isn't entirely clear that you have a lot to lose by implementing your own transaction layer since the indexes you'd want on the version field of a value would only be as expensive or slow as any other secondary index in a transactional database. Though why you'd do this isn't entirely clear (I will like to read about this from Convex some time).
It's useful to see transaction protocols as another tool in your system design tool chest when you care about consistency, atomicity, and isolation. Especially as you build systems that span data systems. Maybe, as Ben Hindman hinted at the last NYC Systems, even proprietary APIs will eventually provide something like two-phase commit so physical systems outside our control can become transactional too.
Transactions are a protocol
— Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) April 20, 2025
short new post pic.twitter.com/nTj5LZUpUr
