August 25, 2025 - Mill Valley

August 25 - August 31

I spent most of last week in Mill Valley taking care of a friend’s dog. I took the ferry into San Francisco from Larkspur for the first time, which took about an hour door-to-door.

What I read

Sophie (a former Notino) writes about pushing more complexity into the database layer and out of tools like Redis with the concept of incremental view maintenance.

Materialized views are obviously useful

As programmers we spend a lot of time shuttling data back and forth between different systems and transforming it from one format to another. Sometimes it gets pretty miserable!

sophiebits.com

I have also been reading a bit more about Rust as we consider adopting it at Notion.

the core of rust

within Rust is a smaller language struggling to get out

jyn.dev

Two Beautiful Rust Programs

This is a short ad of a Rust programming language targeting experienced C++ developers. Being an ad, it will only whet your appetite, consult other resources for fine print.

matklad.github.io

Training

I finished my 3-month weight training cycle last week, so felt alright with taking this week off of lifting. I have not been meeting my running goals, so this was a good way to reset and begin running again.

I have been considering trying to qualify for Boston again in a spring marathon. My previous qualifying time was a 2:56. The standards for my age group have now dropped to a 2:55, so I will have to PR if I want to qualify again.

Health metrics

Steps and sleep are a still lower than I would like.

Languages

I finished the week on Unit 14 of Section 2 (A1). I’ve really been trying to rush through the A1 material on Duolingo in hopes of getting to more exciting content in the future.