Neil Carson - Neil Carson

Taiwan: The kitchen making tasty chips

China will only reclaim Taiwan by force if their leader goes mad. Sometimes that happens to lifelong leaders and dictators (sometimes I worry about my own sanity).

Woodwork

Custom kitchen cabinets, eh?

Perhaps as the next venture, instead of doing this incredibly complex software engineering and architecture combined with years of stress and poor sleep to get to products with high gross margins, I'll just start a panel cutting shop instead.

Cloud

SaaS: How AWS Graviton moves money from Snowflake customers' wallets to shareholders' pockets

...a 76% product gross margin - up from 70% just over a year earlier. Furthermore, they announced approval for a $2bn stock buyback programme. Much of the savings from Graviton isn't resulting in lower prices for Snowflake customers and instead is going to stock buybacks

Data Warehouse

A data warehouse for data apps

Data applications' needs are different from traditional enterprise data warehouses.

Hong Kong

The Lion Rock (獅子山): HK urban hike

In Hong Kong, in half an hour one can go from a cosmopolitan metropolis surrounded by international shopping malls to a mountain, listening to the sound of bamboo blowing in the breeze, a rich green vista of mountains, lakes, beaches and ocean, with wild monkeys, pigs, birdsong and butterflies.

Engineering

Why we don't want just hardcore programmers anymore

Today's software developer can't just have an interest in the machine, like what fascinated me when I grew up programming. He or she must be interested in understanding and solving actual problems for people and businesses, and be able to join the dots back to the underlying technology.

Travel

Making and drinking mezcal

I spent a couple of hours at the Jimenez Mendez distillery, chatting to the 5th Generation distiller. The distillery is in a small shack along the side of a road at the back of a family garden, but their spirits are amazing. The distillation process is described below along with photos.

Travel

Death and remembrance in Oaxaca

I've been incredibly fortunate to spend three wonderful days (only about half of which was spent working!) with friends in Oaxaca, Mexico, seeing firsthand the celebrations of El Dia de los Muertos — the day of the dead — and what an eye-opening, culturally rich experience it was.

Data Warehouse

Being outcompeted by suppliers

It's long-term trouble to be running a business where your competitors control the cost of your product. This didn't end well at my previous employer, and won't end well at some cloud data warehouse companies either.

Hong Kong

Taiwan and US politics

It was interesting watching the foreign support for the Hong Kong riots three years ago. The riots on the surface were in protest at a new extradition bill that the government was trying to pass, but in practice also speak to the lack of opportunities and progress felt by so

Travel

On my quick Amsterdam visit

Comparing Amsterdam to other cities in Europe, the US and Asia, it appears on the surface that the Dutch have got a number of things right—and some of those things would be very controversial in other countries

Snowflake

Comparing to Big Dog Snowflake

It's impossible not to be impressed by the stunning success of Big Dog Snowflake, but it sucks to be compared to them all the time. However there are recent signs that Big Dog is starting to lose its bark, and there's some howling.

Cooking

Perfect poached chicken - back cheat guy (白切鸡)

A recipe, based on sous vide principles, for perfect poached chicken. This recipe is based on the Cantonese preparation, but simplified and modified for temperature-accurate cooking.

Hong Kong

Covid in HK & China, part 2: Where do we go from here?

I've had a "taste of Omicron" myself recently: Having been repeatedly exposed to different forms of Covid at work and outside for the last few months, the virus finally took hold and infected me. I had one night with poor sleep perhaps due to a mild fever, a day or

Woodwork

Hand-made dining table and tips for working with live edge slabs

I built dining tables out of live-edged walnut and maple slabs, with pegged mortise and tenon bases that can be knocked down and flat-packed.

Yellowbrick

A start-up with global gumption

The first code of Yellowbrick was written in Hong Kong, the USA, the UK and Estonia.

Hong Kong

The covid plague in Hong Kong

As a resident of Hong Kong, I have to say the territory is having an absolutely rotten time recently. Unlike most of the world which has chosen to live with covid-19, mainland China still continues to run it's "dynamic zero covid" policy. This is quite effective in the mainland and

Business

Why I love a good crisis

I've recently been doing some soul searching about some of the things I like and dislike the most about my job. In addition to the usual stuff — happy employees, ecstatic customers, winning deals, increasing valuations, congratulatory board meetings, funding rounds and all the usual — there's a form of tricky situation

Yellowbrick

Opinionated musings on data lakes, lake houses, warehouses, SQL Engines

SQL engines aren't data warehouses. SQL tech is a fashion. In-memory analytics makes no sense. Data lakehouses aren't data warehouses. Neither was Hadoop.

Fashion

Why men want handbags, but don't know yet

Most men would benefit from carrying a handbag, but have never tried and in many cases don't dare to.

Yellowbrick

Learning from my hiring mistakes

I've made more than my fair share of hiring mistakes in some areas, and this post tries to dissect why.

Yellowbrick

Improving S3 performance from C++

How do we maximise S3 random IOPS throughput at different block sizes and queue depths?

Cooking

Wok burners, WOKits, BTUs and Wok Hei

Finding the best wok burner isn't just about BTUs or Watts.

Yellowbrick

Why success doesn't feel good

As we try to climb the mountain that goes up and to the right, we sometimes hit potholes in the road. Combined with social media's continual assertion that everyone else is doing better, this makes us feel unnecessarily bad.

Yellowbrick

Rid us of dull corporate apparel!

Branded clothing is a really big thing in technology companies in general. Silicon Valley startups are perpetually giving out "swag" to customers, ranging from all sorts of utility items such as keychains, pens, mugs and coolers, stickers to put on our laptops, and – most importantly – clothing. Clothes have moved far