YC Demo Day this week: ~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 (#006) the joke was “Airbnb for boats.” My marina-logistics friend from that era? His “boring, profitable” pivot (#040) 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?”
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 out-of-distribution events on a schedule.
Work dispatch: 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 (from #101) now has Holder attached and subpoena power — the industry’s HR reckoning is institutionalizing. Documentation remains power.