Kids started school (and so did Database School)

Hey y’all, School started this week! Well not for me, but for my kids. Our two four-year-olds started pre-K4 this week, and so far they've been enjoying it quite a bit. After the first day, they asked to go back the next day, which I'm going to count as a huge win. Our neighborhood is such that a lot of parents walk their kids to school, and it truly feels like the 1950s out there. I drove them to school and couldn't figure out the way that I was supposed to get there. I kept getting turned around by crossing guards! So I just parked the car and we walked from a nearby street over to the school. And it was awesome. I felt like such a dad. --- ### Thoughts from the week I've been talking this week with a lot of different brand designers as I'm trying to figure out the brand for Database School. If you're not familiar with Database School, I am taking several of my database courses and putting them together into one learning platform that is going to live at databaseschool.com. I also have a podcast and I'm firing up a new YouTube channel that will be Database specific. I'm looking for something that is very collegiate and trustworthy and kind of analog. I know that purple gradients and light waves are real popular right now, but I just don't like them! I'm trying to make this something a little bit different. I'll let you in on a little secret. I do have Pinterest and here's the mood board for a database school that I've been sending the different designers: . I've not really ever engaged a brand designer and it's been a fun process so far. They say a lot of stuff like “brand voice” and “brand values” and I'm just like, I don't know, it's a learning platform. But! As I have been talking to them, I'm starting to get a better sense of what the voice and values of Database School are going to be. It's making me feel optimistic about the future of database education. --- 🎬 **YouTube** **Programming by wishful thinking** What if your code could read the way you wish the framework worked? [I'll show you](https://youtu.be/Qr1lYJmBTWI) how I built a powerful Laravel helper for finding all models that use a given trait starting with a made-up interface and ending with a flexible reflection-based collection. **Rewriting SQLite from scratch (yes, really)** [In this episode of Database School,](https://youtu.be/010OKqc3ObM) I chat with Glauber Costa, CEO of Turso, about their audacious decision to rewrite SQLite from the ground up. We cover the technical motivations, open contribution philosophy, and how deterministic simulation testing is unlocking new levels of reliability --- ### Things I found this week *Just a heads up that each Twitter/X screenshot has a link to the original post if you want to go follow the account.* [](https://x.com/drantbradley/status/1955744864563552324) This is a really moving video of a kid that has moved from Australia to Nebraska to play football and they ask him if he misses his family back home and he starts crying. It's just so sweet because he's this big strong guy and he's talking about missing his little brothers. I just can't imagine how much his little brothers must love him. I also want to reject the notion that when my kids are 18, they're going to want nothing to do with me! I am well aware that that may be the case, but I'm not taking it as a foregone conclusion. Hopefully when my kids are 18 and they’re asked if they miss Mom and Dad, some part of them will say yes. --- [](https://x.com/jeffreyhuber/status/1955999330407735337) Do you really want to be the court jester? I’ve talked about this before quite a bit in terms of engagement bait and rage bait. It might work! You might become famous! But then everyone knows you as a rage baiter or an engagement baiter. And while you may get praised in public, you will probably get muted in private. It’s so much better to play it slow and steady than to become a caricature of yourself that you don't actually want to be at the end of the day. --- [](https://x.com/RealFinishes/status/1955939721881743492) There are two lines in this screenshot that stood out to me. One was "adopt an ethic" and the other was at the very end where it says “it requires only virtue, not genius.” This was in response to the question, “how do we build better neighborhoods?” But I think it applies to everything. How do you make better content? How do you become a better parent? How do you become a better friend? You adopt an ethic and then you live up to that ethic. --- [](https://x.com/annamorgsmiley/status/1955704002168885314) Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but did you know that you can hire somebody to come to your house and help you organize? And honestly, it's not even that expensive. When we moved into our new house, we had two two year olds and two newborns. We just needed somebody to help us organize stuff, closets, pantries, drawers. So we went on Facebook and found a woman who has a side business as an organizer. I cannot tell you how unbelievably helpful it was. She came over, looked at all of our drawers and cabinets, went to Target and Container Store and bought a bunch of stuff to help us organize, and then came back and organized it all, labeled a bunch of stuff, put everything where it should go. Easily some of the best money we've ever spent. --- [](https://x.com/vascoabm/status/1955235459652546989) This is a little weird to me to see it named or labeled so explicitly as “Head of CEO content,” but I do think this is probably becoming more normal. I don't know where brands went wrong to where we don't trust them at all, and maybe it's not a trust thing, maybe it's just hard for brands to break through. [Nathan Berry recently said](https://x.com/nathanbarry/status/1954911369381454100) that every business going forward is going to have a component of a content creator, and it seems like that is directionally correct. If you're not already publishing or putting any work out there, I would highly encourage you to start doing something. --- [](https://x.com/SP1NS1R/status/1955475035973640440) Okay, Jeff! I was unfamiliar with your game. He's right! Everything is pulling you back towards the middle. Everyone wants you to be normal in a thousand little ways and if you want to be weird, or frankly, if you want to be yourself, it's going to take a lot of effort. If you want to live any sort of extraordinary life, or any sort of life that is out of the ordinary whatsoever, people are going to think you're crazy. If you don't watch sports, if you don't play video games, if you decide that you are going to pack up a van and drive your family across the whole country one summer, if you want to do anything out of the ordinary, people are going to try to make you more normal. Still, it’s worth it to be weird. --- [](https://x.com/Kulambq/status/1955165491074376121) Exact same sentiment as above. Literally identical. --- [](https://zed.dev/blog/why-llms-cant-build-software) With the launch of GPT-5 this past week, I have actually been feeling a lot better about the future of software development! Because it's not that much better. It is better, but it's not that much better. The way they advertised it was that it was going to be just completely revolutionary. I think we might be at the point where the gains are becoming more incremental and we've plateaued just a little bit. [This article](https://zed.dev/blog/why-llms-cant-build-software) is a nice, reasonable take on why LLMs can't write full software. I think they're incredibly useful and I use them every day, but there's still room for the human to do work and this is a good article as to why. --- ### Let's close the loop I send out all this random stuff every week and I often get great replies from people that know a lot more about the thing that I sent, or know about something related. This section is for the things that y'all send that are related to previous issues! (I’m still working on getting the previous issues online, so bear with me there) [In follow-up to last week’s two types of fun](https://app.bentonow.com/share/l740G6V0jGJarP), [Noel De Martin](https://noeldemartin.com/now) shared two podcast recommendations: - [**Oologies interview with Laurie Santos**](https://www.alieward.com/ologies/eudemonology) (1h 10min). In this podcast they interview scientists about different topics, and this one was about happiness. It's more of an informal conversation, and a great overview of what influences happiness and how to think about it. - [**Solved podcast with Mark Manson**](https://solvedpodcast.com/happiness/) (3h 20min). In this one they go into the research and history of happiness studies, and it's lot more in depth. Mark Manson wrote "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F\*ck", you may have heard of it. They also have a free PDF summary in case you want to just look at that. Give them listen! --- If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter and think a friend may enjoy reading it each week too, please forward it to them! They can sign up to receive it weekly here: . That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know. Talk soon, Aaron {{ ENV.unsubscribe\_personal | default: visitor.unsubscribe\_url | hyperlink: "Click here to unsubscribe." }}