YC Demo Day this week: about 100 companies, and the batch reads like a map of 2017’s ambitions: AI-for-everything (radiology, contracts, crops), a heavy fintech contingent aiming at everything banks do badly, and a few “hard tech” moonshots. Four years ago the joke was “Airbnb for boats.” My marina-logistics friend from that era? His “boring, profitable” pivot just raised a Series A. The joke companies died; the spreadsheet-shaped ones compounded. Demo Day is a portfolio-priors update on schedule: whatever’s overrepresented in March is oversaturated by August, and the winner is usually filed under “wait, that’s a company?”
The Champions League quarter-final draw has burned every prediction as constitutionally required (my methodology this year, GitHub stars of each club’s engineering org, died with Barcelona). The tournament remains the best distributed system for generating surprising events on a schedule.
Work dispatch: the Kubernetes migration hit its first boss fight, stateful services. The pods are cattle but the database is still a cathedral, and the RFC’s cheerful “we’ll address persistence in phase 2” was, I can now report, foreshadowing. All RFCs contain one sentence of foreshadowing; the senior skill is finding it before the incident does.
TIL: StatefulSets, persistent volume claims, and humility. Also that Uber’s investigation now has Holder attached and subpoena power. The industry’s HR reckoning is institutionalizing. Documentation remains power.