Database School is officially launched!

Hey y'all, Well, we did it folks. DatabaseSchool.com is officially launched. I talked about it on one of the [recent episodes](https://mostlytechnical.com/episodes/108-database-school-launch) of Mostly Technical, but here's the quick recap: this is the all-in-one database platform that's going to be my main focus moving forward. Right now it has four courses on it: two on Postgres, one on SQLite, and one on MySQL. It was a sprint to get the platform finished and I did end up sleeping in the office one night, but it wasn't actually that bad. I'm really pleased with the reception so far. A lot of people have been enjoying it, and it feels great to finally have a home where I can keep adding content without the pressure of doing big launches for minor courses or series. Up next is the advent of SQL which will kick off next week. It will be a fun series of small SQL challenges leading all the way up to Christmas. --- ### Thoughts from the week All right, we’ve got to talk about it. I’ve been thinking about AI a lot this past week. I’ve been using some of the big models like Gemini 3, Claude Code, and I have…many thoughts about them. My first thought is that they’re incredibly good. Better than I expected, honestly. And that part scares me a little. I’ve got a bunch of kids, a wife who stays home, no traditional job, and most of what I do is teach coding or more broadly development. The AI gods are getting pretty good at it….that's the part that scares me. But after working with these tools pretty intensely for the past two weeks, there’s another part of me that’s not scared at all, because current software developers have a massive advantage. These AI gods are not actually as intelligent despite what I just said. The way I talk to them (using voice-to-text, which really lays bare your thought process) shows how much institutional knowledge I already lean on. I’m not saying, “Build me an app that does X.” I’m breaking problems down into small pieces, designing architecture, telling it which libraries to use, where to apply event-driven patterns, combine these two code paths using a flag instead of having completely different paths, optimize this section of the code to be less time complex. That’s all knowledge that took *years* to accumulate, which thankfully I already have. If I were trying to one-shot a whole application with these models, I’d be frustrated or worse, I wouldn’t even realize the architecture was a mess until I was buried in edge cases because the architecture is so bad. And that’s what convinces me that mid-to-senior developers, right now, can wield these tools like the sharpest scalpel ever invented. My existential worry is: what happens later? What happens when we get too old and that knowledge goes away? Are younger developers learning the fundamentals we learned coming up? I honestly don’t know. Part of me thinks that when we were teenagers hacking on Microsoft FrontPage, HTML goodies, MySpace layouts, and Xanga themes… maybe chatting with LLMs is the modern version of that. Maybe it’s all just another on-ramp to the same deep concepts, and they’ll learn everything they need through different tools. It’s just hard for me to put myself in the shoes of a 20-year-old learning to code today. So I don’t have any definitive answers. What I will say is: If you’re an intermediate or senior engineer, you absolutely need to be using these tools. I’m moving faster than I ever thought possible. If you’re a junior engineer, I still think fundamentals matter, not syntax or low-level details necessarily, but the fundamentals of software architecture. That might be the new center of gravity. I’d genuinely love to hear y’all’s thoughts. I won’t, and hopefully never will, pretend to be an expert on something that was invented five minutes ago. But I am using these tools a lot, and I have feelings about them. Please don’t take any of those as gospel truth. --- 🎬 **YouTube** **Just use Postgres with Denis Magda** In this episode, I talked with Dennis Magda, author of Just Use Postgres!, about the wide world of modern Postgres, from JSON and full-text search to generative AI, time-series storage, and even message queues. We covered when Postgres should be your go-to tool, when it shouldn’t, and why understanding its breadth helps developers build better systems. Check it out on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/IdyK8XB2l6g) or your [favorite podcast player](https://share.transistor.fm/s/5ee33dea). --- ### 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/PeteGGriffin/status/1994926672425226564) This is such a lovely description of a marriage. --- [](https://x.com/blakeir/status/1995333634086387865) > The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. (from the full article at [https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query?utm\_source=publication-search](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query?utm_source=publication-search)) This is how I feel about publishing things online, and this is why I do it. I've talked before about how being on Twitter is a friend catcher, but so is blogging, writing a newsletter, making YouTube videos. Of course, you will be subjected to random passersby who are very rude and dismissive, but that is just the price of playing the game. I think the upsides are far higher. And I will again say that the goal of publishing anything is not to get the most internet points, but rather to find more interesting people and interesting things. The goal is not to become so watered down that you have mass appeal, but to find the niche that you want to be in. --- [](https://x.com/acesounderglass/status/1995724414051029159) As the holidays approach, this is a good tip for buying presents. I once bought a friend a very beautiful pair of matte black scissors, because who would ever buy a beautiful pair of scissors for themselves? --- [](https://x.com/clairevo/status/1996015407766077590) I don't actually think being irrelevant is that much of a problem. I think maybe… better to be extreme than to be normal. Better to be crazy than to try to fit into a mold. Better to do something insane than to wish you had. Better to try to achieve your dreams than wake up full of regret when you're old. --- [](https://x.com/muratdemirbas/status/1995953265331372126) > Progress comes from motion. Momentum is the invisible engine of any significant work. A project feels daunting when you face it as a blank page. It feels easier when you built some momentum with some next steps. So, momentum makes the difference between blocked and flowing. Full blog post here: I've always said that motion begets motion and progress begets progress. And this has continually proved true in my life. When I haven't touched a project for a while, it becomes more daunting every day to pick it up. But when I'm in the middle of a project, it's incredibly easy to keep going. A lot of people online will be like, I don't know what project to start. And I always just say anything, literally anything, do literally anything. You'll figure it out along the way. It's much easier to course correct when you're in motion than it is when you're standing still. --- [](https://x.com/WillManidis/status/1996204139353973199) There's a guy named Eugene Peterson who wrote a version of the Bible called The Message, which I will just as a side note say is a very helpful paraphrase of the Bible. I don't think it is an actual translation, but nonetheless it is helpful. Eugene Peterson coined this term, "a long obedience in the same direction" when he described Christian discipleship. He actually wrote a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, talking about what discipleship looks like in a society that optimizes for speed. Whether or not you are a Christian, I think the same principle applies. You've got to stay in the game. You have to continue to move in the same direction. You've got to stay alive if you want to win. --- [](https://x.com/alyssaleann/status/1996082529120780289) Every now and then stories like this of hardworking, charming, quaint postal workers will pop up, and each one is a delight, reminiscent of a simpler time. --- 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." }}