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Is the before/after backwards?

iblaineon Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

https://docdiagram.com - A tool for creating technical diagrams. Basically an upgrade from mermaid. Load it into your MCP, prompt it, you'll get a clean diagram binary file in svg/png/etc.

https://anomalyarmor.ai/ - A tool for managing data observability and data anomalies.

Used daily by customers but also for my own work. These tools fill a gap that helps me get sh*t done.

iblaineon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

AnomalyArmor (http://anomalyarmor.ai) is a data observability platform. I got tired of being priced out of existing tools and hand-configuring per-table thresholds for every new dashboard. An AI agent sets up schema-drift, freshness, and row-count monitoring on Snowflake/Databricks in minutes, and you can ask natural-language questions when something breaks.

$5/table, about half what incumbents charge. Happy to trade a 30-day Professional trial code for honest feedback. Reply here or blaine@anomalyarmor.ai.

iblaineon Welcome to FastMCP

FastMCP is great and this post is overdue. What did FastMCP solve? Lots of code reduction, reduced complexity and the ability to streamline auth. Offloading the auth was a huge benefit. With FastMCP I could replace all my custom JWT validation and get an auth workflow with fewer steps.

iblaineon Claude Code Remote Control

Boggles my mind that this is actually a thing that still needs to be solved. Just remote into your computer (I prefer TeamViewer). That is it. One step.

iblaineon There is an AI code review bubble

I had a bad experience with greptile due to what seemed to be excessive noise and nit comments. I have been using cursorbot for a year and really like it.

iblaineon I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it

Remind me in 5 years. AI tools don’t hide the fact that the output needs to improve. Calling out the obvious problems is a lazy take.

iblaineon GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

This is common. Big company buys smaller company. Smaller company execs stay on and establish the idea of independence. Eventually smaller company execs move on and Big company fills the ranks with their employees. Nothing sinister. Just how it goes.

iblaineon Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

Having been aquihired three times by FAANG+, the biggest take away is have accelerated vesting. To do that you got be lucky or in the C-suite. Being bought out usually sounds better then reality for everyone but a few that get that accelerated vesting clause.

iblaineon INNER JOIN ON vs WHERE clause (2009)

Is there a difference between implicit and explicit joins? No, but use an explain plan to be sure.

(Saved you a click)

iblaineon Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

An IRC bot that would kindly insult project managers should they join our engineering chat channel while doing a deployment.

iblaineon I Like Makefiles

The correct answer is I don’t like makefiles when they are abused. They have no state yet people try use them as such and create pain for others.

iblaineon ChartDB – Free and open source, database design editor

I used to be bullish on creating ERDs, often using them as an onboarding exercise, even for databases with 100+ tables. However, comprehensive ERDs are becoming rare, and that's okay. Their value is short-lived due to the high cost of maintenance. While polished ERDs can be nice to have, they aren't essential.

For creating ERDs as code, tools like dbdiagram.io and eraser.io are popular options. ERWin is the original tool for UML/ERD diagrams, but it's expensive.

iblaineon Pipe Syntax in SQL

Looking at this reminds me of Apache Pig. That’s not a compliment.

iblaineon Open Source Python ETL

Low code ETL tools (informatica, Appworx, talend, pentaho, ssis) were the original services for ELT/ETL. A lot of progress was made to go towards ETL-as-code starting with Airflow/Luigi. Going back to low code seems backwards as this point.

(I have used all of the above tools in my 15+ yr career. Code as ETL was a huge industry shift)

iblaineon You'll regret using natural keys

It’s funny that indexing used to be unavailable when processing big data on Hadoop. Now that we have options to do so we now care. As tech evolves we adapt.

iblaineon Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs

My OCD approves of this idea. Let’s also add, IDs cannot start with 0 or O.

iblaineon Acme Klein Bottle

One of the best gifts you can ever gift yourself.

iblaineon Colorado pastor accused of multimillion dollar crypto scheme

Is crypto or the pastor more to blame?

iblaineon Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

TL;DR; do the easy things fist, in this case it was to fix bad SQL

Given the options to optimize SQL, move read operations to replicas, shard data or go towards micro services, optimizing SQL is the easy choice.

iblaineon Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

A walking bike with a wheel in the front and 6 Theo Jansen type legs in the back

https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-aileen-cannon-comes-out-...

iblaineon There is no data engineering roadmap

Agreed. The job title of Data Engineer gets abused. Some DE's are Analysts, others are Backend SWEs. Their goals are aligned, to create value out of data, and their methods may differ greatly.

iblaineon There is no data engineering roadmap

The Data Engineering track seems to attract data analysts and non-engineers. I’m one of them, have worked with many others in my same bucket. What makes Data Engineers excel, I think, is to have all the skills of a software engineer + the ability to think like a data analyst.

SQL is definitely part of that journey, and more skills should be mastered if you’re going to do things like use Kafka, airflow or spark.

iblaineon Tilt Five – Bring holograms home – Play your favorite games in 3D

I saw the kickstarted version of this at a maker fairy and was blown away. The product was great for what it did.

iblaineon This is valid Python syntax

Idea for a new linter; throw a warning if it sees extreme non-intuitive uses of Python. Given the trajectory of Python improvements over the past few years, this linter may not be far off.

iblaineon Why are developers expected to estimate tasks at all?

It’s monumentally frustrating to be forced to give estimates too soon in the planning process. The compromise, I hope, is to end up in a place where most of the problem is known and some is unknown, and you get there by breaking down the original problem. Leave it up to the “buyer” to digest your best estimate into their planning process.

iblaineon GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

Same thing happened at LinkedIn after the Microsoft acquisition. LinkedIn was using gmail, Google was quick to let the g suite contract die, so the timeline to move from gmail to Outlook was accelerated. Engineers at LinkedIn were livid about being forced to move off gmail.

iblaineon Ask HN: How do you test SQL?

If I were building a tool to test SQL, then I'd try to load the SQL into a dataframe, then test it by mocking the tables and the output. This is a tough problem to solve. If testing is important, possibly move away from SQL and towards ORMs.

iblaineon CTEs as lookup tables

CTEs still give me anxiety due to their inability to be potentially not be optimized. I know many database engines today optimize for this type of thing, I'm thankful for it, but there was as time 10+ years ago when CTE expressions could take down databases. I also blame DBT for convincing people that CTEs are good. CTEs are only good if used correctly.

iblaineon FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

It’s unfortunate that what started out with altruistic motives, a method for decentralized anonymous asset exchange, is being derailed by opportunists. There was a time where a 51% attack was the biggest concern.

All that said, I’m not surprised at where we are today.