MTAR 09: The importance of persistence software , the beauty of the ah ha moment, and why organizations need to be built according to Dunbar's Number and Conway's Law by More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met

Welcome to Episode 55 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman, Developer Advocate at Redgate, for a candid conversation about AI, governance, and the economics shaping today’s technology landscape.From database culture and open source philosophy to AI monetization models and corporate risk, this episode explores a central tension: if data is the product, who actually benefits? Kellyn shares why governance must come before adoption, why many organizations implement AI without defining the problem they’re solving, and why internal behavior—not external attackers—often creates the biggest security risk.This is a grounded, unfiltered look at the intersection of technology, responsibility, and profit—and what it means for the people building and using these systems.📲 Kellyn Gorman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyngorman/

In this episode of More Than a Refresh: T3D Sessions, Marijn Markus, AI Lead and Managing Data Scientist at Capgemini, breaks down a question most teams aren’t asking clearly enough: what happens when the majority of what we see online isn’t coming from real people?The conversation moves beyond AI hype into something more immediate. Marijn explains the difference between misinformation and disinformation, how bot-driven narratives scale faster than truth, and why outrage has become a business model. From fake personas to coordinated information campaigns, this is a grounded look at how digital systems shape perception, trust, and decision-making.Whether you’re leading a team, building products, or making strategic calls based on online signals, this episode offers a sharper lens on what you’re actually seeing and what you might be missing.📲 Marijn Markus:https://www.linkedin.com/in/marijnmarkus/

In this episode, JD talks with Thomas Carnevale, founder of Umbrella Security, about a gap most people don’t realize exists until it’s too late: the difference between systems that look secure and systems that actually deter.Cameras are everywhere, and that’s exactly the problem. As Thomas explains, visibility alone doesn’t stop anything anymore. Real security requires response, timing, and systems designed to interrupt behavior, not just record it.Drawing from decades of experience designing enterprise and government security infrastructure, Thomas walks through what effective protection actually looks like today, where “AI” fits into the picture, and why human judgment still needs to stay in the loop.📲 Thomas Carnevale: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carnevalethomas/Umbrella Security Systems: https://www.linkedin.com/company/umbrella-security-systems/

In this episode, JD sits down with Andrew Bolton, Co-Founder and CEO of Tech Rescue, to explore what happens when a hyper-connected world leaves millions behind. What starts as a conversation about 24-hour technical support quickly expands into something bigger: access to healthcare, logistics, and the growing gap between technology’s capabilities and real human support.Andrew explains how 80 million Americans have been left behind by rapid technological change, including 16 million without reliable access to essential healthcare services . Tech Rescue positions itself as more than IT support. It operates as a 24/7 life concierge, coordinating everything from doctor appointments and transportation to navigating smart home devices and connected systems.From punch cards to smartphones more powerful than moon-landing computers, this conversation examines the paradox of modern infrastructure: we are more connected than ever, yet many people still struggle to access basic services.📲 Andrew Bolton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-bolton-/TechRescue Llc:https://www.linkedin.com/company/techrescue-llc/https://techrescue.io/

In this episode, JD sits down with Hunter O’Brien to break down one of the most misunderstood areas of AWS: Identity and Access Management (IAM). Designing policies sounds straightforward, until wildcards, over-permissioned roles, and unclear resource access create real risk in production.Hunter explains how the AWS IAM Policy Simulator allows teams to safely test roles before they reach production. By simulating API calls without affecting live systems or billing, organizations can design least-privilege policies, validate MFA enforcement, and avoid accidental overexposure.

Welcome to episode 55 of More Than a Refresh. In this episode, JD Drake talks with Samantha Baldwin, Policy & Research Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), about the growing push for age verification laws in the United States.These proposals are often framed as protecting children online. But what do they actually require from operating systems, platforms, and users? They discuss how these laws work, why many may be technically ineffective, and what the long term implications could be for digital rights, anonymity, and online speech. Samantha is a Policy & Research Staff Technologist on EFF's Public Interest Technology team. She has a background in software development, electrical engineering, and linguistics. Samantha loves open source software, reverse engineering, team sports, cycling and weiqi. Samantha is passionate about safety, equity, digital privacy and is urgently concerned about the climate crisis.

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, JD sits down with Yurii Rashkovskii to unpack a frustration many experienced engineers quietly share: why is Postgres so difficult to evolve?The conversation centers on architecture. From tightly coupled storage and transaction layers to row-oriented execution models, Yurii explains why experimenting with new storage engines or fundamentally different designs inside Postgres is far from simple. What looks modular on the surface often reveals deep interdependencies underneath.If you’ve ever pushed Postgres beyond the “average install” and hit architectural ceilings, this episode will resonate.📲 Yurii Rashkovskii: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yrashk/Inferal: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inferal/🎧 Listen to all More Than a Refresh episodes:https://www.commandprompt.com/mtar/

In this episode, JD sits down with Command Prompt CIO Ildefonso Camargo to challenge a common assumption in modern infrastructure: if you can afford the cloud, why wouldn’t you use it?What starts as a simple cost comparison turns into a deeper discussion about accounting realities, hardware depreciation, staffing requirements, compliance, and operational risk. Ildefonso shares what sparked the conversation—seeing a large enterprise sign a long-term cloud contract with a massive monthly bill—and questioning whether owning infrastructure might actually make more financial sense.

In this episode, JD sits down with Amanda Nystrom, CEO of Command Prompt and National Board Certified Health & Wellbeing Coach, to talk about wellness for people in tech and why most advice misses the point.Rather than focusing on quick fixes, discipline, or one-size-fits-all tools, Amanda explains why awareness has to come first. They explore how environment, nervous system load, work culture, and internal narratives all shape health outcomes, often more than diet or exercise alone.

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions.In this episode, Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Lev Kokotov, creator of PGDog, about one of the hardest problems in PostgreSQL: horizontal scaling in real production systems.Lev shares lessons learned from scaling Postgres at Instacart during periods of extreme growth, and why existing approaches often fail when applied to large, established applications. They explore what happens when rewriting millions of lines of code simply isn’t an option—and why tooling needs to adapt to applications, not the other way around.

Welcome to Episode 54 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Kevin Jernigan to talk about AI hype versus reality, the real limits of scaling large language models, and why more data centers don’t necessarily mean smarter systems.They explore the economic and technical constraints behind today’s AI boom, what current models get fundamentally wrong, and what it would take to move beyond pattern matching toward something more meaningful.

In this episode, JD sits down with Brian Fehrle to unpack a deceptively simple PostgreSQL operation that can trigger serious performance issues: adding a new column with a default value.Brian explains how PostgreSQL’s optimization—introduced to avoid table rewrites and long locks—can leave data “virtual” rather than physically written to disk. While this makes schema changes faster, it can quietly confuse the query planner, skew statistics, and turn previously fast queries into production problems, especially when the new column is used in WHERE clauses.This episode is a must-listen for DBAs, Postgres operators, and engineers managing large PostgreSQL workloads—especially in cloud environments—who want to avoid subtle changes that can cascade into days of degraded performance.

In this episode, JD is joined by Alan Lazaros for a conversation about systems, consistency, and the long game behind meaningful progress. While most people focus on big breakthroughs, this discussion explores how small, intentional actions—repeated daily—compound into exponential results over time.Drawing from personal experience and years of coaching, Alan reflects on health, wealth, relationships, and fulfillment as interconnected systems. Rather than chasing intensity or quick wins, the episode reframes growth as something built gradually, through steady effort and long-term thinking.

In this AWS-focused episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with James Campbell about one of the most common (and most expensive) sources of cloud surprises: storage choices. James breaks down how AWS offers an overwhelming number of options across EBS, S3, and Glacier tiers, and why “flexibility” often translates into misconfiguration, avoidable spend, and hidden performance bottlenecks.They also dig into a frequent pain point: backups and snapshots. JD and James explain what people misunderstand about AWS snapshots, why “snapshot completion time” can be deceptive, and how resilience assumptions can fall apart if you don’t plan for availability zone / region boundaries and the time it takes to copy data across them. If your AWS bill feels unpredictable—or your retention and DR plan is more hope than strategy—this episode reframes storage as a first-class architecture decision, not an afterthought.

In this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Glauber Costa about AgentFS, a virtual file system designed to solve one of the hardest problems in modern AI infrastructure: managing state and data isolation for fast-moving, sandboxed AI agents. Glauber explains how AgentFS treats the data layer as part of the sandbox itself, enabling agents to snapshot, move, and resume execution in milliseconds without relying on heavy infrastructure.They explore why traditional systems become too slow and complex as agent-based workloads scale, how representing an agent’s state as a lightweight, SQLite-backed file system enables rapid mobility, and why rewriting SQLite in Rust was necessary to address concurrency and performance limitations. The conversation offers a practical look at how AI is pushing infrastructure toward lighter, faster, and more state-aware designs.

JD welcomes back Andrew Sullivan, former Chair of the Internet Architecture Board and former President & CEO of the Internet Society. Listen in as they continue their conversation on the “enshittification” of the internet, how consolidation and regulation are reshaping a network built on open standards, and why we may be closer than we think to losing the internet as we once knew it.

JD sits down with Amanda Nystrom to explore an often-overlooked reality in the tech industry: wellness is not a personal side concern—it’s a performance issue.Drawing parallels between system audits, Postgres health checks, and human behavior, Amanda explains why teams can’t expect long-term reliability, scalability, or high performance if they ignore the health of the people behind the systems. Just as neglected infrastructure leads to outages and technical debt, ignored habits and burnout eventually undermine human performance.This conversation reframes wellness in terms engineers understand: sustainability, performance, and future readiness. If you care about building resilient systems, this episode makes the case for building resilient people, too.

In this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Andrew Smith, Senior Developer/DBA, about a foundational concept in software engineering that quietly powers modern systems: code generation and single sources of truth.Andrew walks through the evolution of code generation—from early macros and assembly language to modern model-driven architectures—and explains why generating code from a centralized definition is one of the most effective ways to build scalable, maintainable systems. Using practical examples from C, PostgreSQL, and modern frameworks, he breaks down how code generation reduces duplication, prevents drift, and keeps complex systems aligned over time.

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions.In this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Justin Graf, Senior DBA & Engineer at Command Prompt, about a topic every Postgres team needs to understand: why monitoring alone isn’t enough—and why full logging is essential for diagnosing database problems. Justin explains how organizations often rely solely on monitoring tools like PGStatStatements, CloudWatch, or Datadog, without realizing that these tools can’t show query parameters, historical performance shifts, or the root cause behind sudden CPU spikes. Without full logging, teams end up blind during outages, wasting hours trying to detect issues that proper logs would have revealed immediately.

Welcome to Episode 13 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions!

In this session, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with Kevin Jernigan, Chief Product Officer at J4 Capital LLC, whose career spans decades across the world’s biggest database and cloud companies.Kevin walks us through his journey from Oracle, AWS (Aurora PostgreSQL), MongoDB (Atlas Serverless), and Google Cloud, reflecting on what it meant to “reinvent the wheel” in database engineering — and why he ultimately stepped away from the database world.

If you’re interested in databases, AI efficiency, brain-scale compute, or the future of machine learning, this short talk is for you.

Welcome to Episode 10 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Andrew Sullivan — President of Anvil Walrus Den Holdings, Inc. and longtime Internet engineer and policy leader.

Andrew explains how the open, decentralized Internet envisioned by its founders is being reshaped by the dominance of just a handful of tech giants. From Canada’s policy battles with Meta and Google to the way platforms have replaced the open web for billions of people, Andrew highlights what’s at stake.

Welcome to Episode 8 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions.

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Silona Bonewald, Open Source Standards Pioneer and InnerSource Expert, about 10 things you didn’t know about blockchain. Silona takes a historical and systemic look at how blockchain emerged long before Bitcoin, and why its uses go far beyond cryptocurrency.

Welcome to Episode 5 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Alan Chavez — Product Engineer specialized in Growth, and Chief Technology Officer at Torta Studios — about the practice of growth engineering and how data-driven decisions shape the success of new products.

Alan shares how retention and activation metrics drive real business outcomes, why retention curves are critical signals of product viability, and how activation benchmarks can determine long-term success.

Welcome to Episode 3 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake sits down with Dr. Aaron N. Cutshall, Principal Data Architect at SQLRV, LLC., to discuss the power and performance benefits of set-based processing in relational databases like PostgreSQL.

With database experience dating back to the 1980s, Aaron shares why set-based thinking is disappearing from modern education, how treating a database like a file system hurts performance, and why leveraging the database engine for what it was designed to do can yield exponential speed gains.

From clear analogies—like magnets for sorting ball bearings—to real-world performance comparisons, this short talk challenges developers to rethink iterative, row-by-row approaches and embrace the efficiency of set-based operations.If you work with Postgres, big data, or want to sharpen your database fundamentals, this episode is for you.

Welcome to Episode 1 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Tushar Pednekar, Co-founder of Synx Data Labs, about Apache CloudBerry — a new open source, Postgres-based analytics platform designed to scale from terabytes to petabytes.

They explore how CloudBerry offers a true open-source alternative to legacy systems like Greenplum, the importance of code parity with PostgreSQL, and why stability and governance matter in enterprise-grade analytics. If you're into distributed computing, big data, or Postgres at scale, this 10-minute talk is for you.

Welcome to Episode 48 of More Than a Refresh! Join JD as he sits down with Super Connector and T-Squared Founder, Marc Nathan, to discuss the value of a strong first impression, psychological profit, the role of culture fit in hiring, and why you don't hear a lot of honking in Texas.

Welcome to Episode 46 of More Than a Refresh! Join JD as he sits down with Elizabeth McCormick, a former US ARMY Black Hawk Helicopter Pilot turned Inspirational Speaker specializing in Leadership. In this episode, they explore the power of choice in dissatisfaction, the intricate relationship between confidence and self-worth, and the power of rhinestone flak jackets.

Welcome to episode 45 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Montana Low, Founder and CEO @ PostgresML. Listen in as they discuss pragmatic perfectionism, why ML should happen in databases, and the difference between "hype beast" AI vs. "get shit done" AI.

Welcome to episode 44 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Lindsey Simon, VP Engineering at Vercel. Listen in as they differentiate between failure and opportunity, discuss the link between advertising and UX, and explain why "the long road" is actually just "the road." Plus, JD finally gets Rickrolled.

Welcome to episode 43 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Leta Keane, Experienced Front End Engineering Instructor. Listen in as they discuss investing in humans, not assets; having a fixed mindset vs. a growth mindset; and why "luxury" isn't just another yacht - it's childcare.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/letakeane/

Welcome to episode 42 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Hugh Forrest, Co-President & Chief Programming Officer @ SXSW. Listen in as they discuss collaborative problem solving, how humans parse authenticity, and that time Barack Obama back-channeled to nab a speaking slot at SXSW.

Welcome to episode 41 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with jack of all trades (and master of many), Silona Bonewald, Founder & President @ Leadingbit Solutions. Listen in as they discuss production readiness, "Gutenberg moments," dude bros, and why the OSS community needs to get involved in standards.

Welcome to episode 39 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Dave Stokes, Technology Evangelist @ Percona. Listen in as they discuss Postgres vs. MySQL, maintaining "boring but vital" OSS projects, and how to save a piece of data for 100+ years.

Welcome to Episode 36 of More than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Dr. Lauran Star, Workforce DE&I Psychologist, Strategist, & Speaker. Listen in as they discuss being diverse "enough," white privilege vs. class privilege, and why evidence-based research should guide us into a new phase of IDE.