Journal
Thinking, argument and occasional provocation from the people building Sixta.
Where Does Your War Room Actually Live?
We asked database and SRE teams where they actually coordinate during a critical incident. 58% said chat, 33% said video, 8% still use a physical room, and nobody chose Jira. The result says something useful about the difference between tools built for tracking incidents and tools built for resolving them.
The AI Hype Is Colliding with Reality
MIT studied 300 public AI deployments and found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable P&L impact. The pattern behind the 5% that work is not better models or bigger budgets. It is specificity: solving one painful operational problem instead of bolting generic AI onto existing workflows.
Calling AI Code Slop Is Lazy
The backlash against AI-generated code follows a pattern that has played out before: a new tool lowers the barrier to entry, incumbents panic about quality, and the ceiling for what skilled practitioners can accomplish rises anyway. People made the same arguments about Rails, and the companies that ignored the naysayers built GitHub, Shopify and Airbnb.
Even If MySQL Became the Default Again
PostgreSQL's rise was driven by defaults, not deliberate selection. But reversing the defaults would not reverse the outcome. PostgreSQL has built two structural advantages that MySQL cannot easily replicate, and Oracle's recent refusal to change course suggests it has no intention of trying.
The gap between troubleshooting data and strategic intelligence
As database estates grow more complex, teams cobble together CloudWatch, observability tools, and CUR data — generating data without increasing visibility. Why the next layer of database intelligence needs to work differently.