bradhe

Current month $13,648,114,178,401.01 188,253,226,212%

Forecasted month end $18,729,381,032,152.4

Apparently my company owes the combined GDP of France, Germany, and UK to AWs.

Tower (tower.dev) | Senior Backend / Platform Engineer | London or Berlin | HYBRID | Full-time

Tower is a Python-native serverless data platform. Data teams write plain Python, and we handle packaging, dependency resolution, scheduling, and execution across a serverless runtime built on Apache Iceberg. There's no clusters to manage, no YAML to write, no pipelines to rewrite to fit someone else's engine. If you've ever wanted your local Python script to just run in production at scale without a Databricks detour, that's the product.

We're a small, senior team split between London and Berlin. We've built a lot of tech: Custom run dispatch service, multi-region routing, storage based on Apache Iceberg, and the runtime itself, to name a few. This is deep systems work--things like scheduling, distributed execution, and performance. We're not gluing SaaS together.

Stack: Go and Rust for the platform, Python everywhere it matters, Kubernetes (EKS + Karpenter) on AWS, RDS Postgres, ElastiCache Redis, S3/Iceberg, WorkOS for auth.

Looking for:

* strong distributed-systems fundamentals

* comfort owning a system end to end

* taste for correctness under load

Bonus: data-platform, query-engine, or Iceberg experience; async Rust; Kubernetes internals.

Apply / questions: Email in bio — mention HN.

Wild to me that this is on the Snowflake blog. I understand why, but...what a sign of the times.

Okay fair point

Got it, so every country should focus on having a mediocre-at-best AI strategy by refusing to work together? Surely this will create a better future instead of pooling resources.

This vaguely-nationalist world view around tech that’s emerging in Europe is dangerous, man.

On the brain drain problem in particular, one way to ensure talent sticks around is to create a good environment for people to do their best work. In much of Europe, getting bureaucracy out of the way and encouraging real investment would go a long way. People leave because they can make more money and they want to be surrounded by the best people. People would trade some of that off to stick around their home countries, however if you go to California and talk to folks from e.g. NL or DE working on this stuff, they have a lot to say about innovation and working culture back home.

God the name was very triggering as someone who worked in the valley 2011-2018 time frame…

When you're successful and rich (enough, at least), this is a nice whimsical thing to say. When you're suffering in the trenches, this isn't very helpful.

I have a really hard time telling if this is despite the current administration’s best efforts, because the current administration’s policies, or just an artifact of government inertia.

Top level: Super excited to witness this in my lifetime.

Edit: Also, my 40 years of life leads me towards the latter category.

I've actually been experimenting with using Ghidra and Opus to create human-consumable, reverse-engineered software. My ultimate dream would be a buildable EverQuest client. Opus does a decent job of pulling out various subsystems and understanding how it works. I was able to get a pretty much working networking layer for instance with less than an hour's work.

Tower | Senior/Principal Software Engineers | London, UK / Berlin, DE | https://jobs.tower.dev

Data teams waste countless hours wrestling with infrastructure instead of solving their businesses’ most critical problem: How to get more value from their data. The problem gets even worse with the AI revolution in flight. Tower changes that.

We're a Python-native serverless platform built on Apache Iceberg with powerful ETL and Lakehouse management tools. We integrate seamlessly with enterprise systems and make companies more nimble by letting them choose the best engine for each job while maintaining full data ownership.

We're focused on hiring developers that love the data ecosystem, are interested in really hard distributed systems problems, and working on dev tools.

Send a message to me, the CTO, at brad (at) tower.dev

Except when "gambling adicts" end up as a cover for money laundering and funneling cash to people to buy influence.

Cue outrage from the conservative administration for checks notes quality journalism.

political violence being much more common historically than racial or other forms of violence

This is true if you take a very loose definition of "political violence" lol and probably just disingenuous at best.

us-east-1 is actually dozens of physical buildings distributed over a massive area. It's not like a single data center somewhere...

Thanks...probably an issue with Framer during the outage.

Hetzner users are like the Linux users for cloud.

Yeah I think there are a number of "hidden" dependencies on different regions, especially us-east-1. It's an artifact of it being AWS' largest region, etc.

Seems the underlying issue is with DynamoDB, according to the status page, which will have a big blast radius in other services. AWS' services form a really complicated graph and there's likely some dependency, potentially hidden, on us-east-1 in there.

us-east-1 was, probably still is, AWS' most massive deployment. Huge percentage of traffic goes through that region. Also, lots of services backhaul to that region, especially S3 and CloudFront. So even if your compute is in a different region (at Tower.dev we use eu-central-1 mostly), outages in us-east-1 can have some halo effect.

This outage seems really to be DynamoDB related, so the blast radius in services affected is going to be big. Seems they're still triaging.

Configuration is a spectrum and this is close to JSON.

A suspect had been apprehended. Let’s see if it’s actually the person who did it.

This looks to me like they are acknowledging that their claims were premature, possibly due to claims of false advertising, but are otherwise carrying forward as they were.

Delusionaly generous take. Perhaps even zealotry.

This is going to be remembered as a really weird tale in the annals of our industry’s history.

Anyone else get strong GPT5 vibes from this article?

Isn’t that my point?

Honestly good question. Second time Gleam marketing has showed up on front page in a few days. I’m pretty well plugged in to the state of the industry and never heard of it.

Was super surprised to see this #1 on the front page just now. Really makes you wonder.

Could be a great time to revisit the trades where AI has a long way to go in helping out.

We’re experimenting with this stuff. So far great. Way better isolation (obviously) than containers. Pretty easy to use so far. Any gotchas?

Not sure how I feel about “front-paging hackernews” as part of a devrel take home test. Obviously, I understand how important it is—I want my devrels to write content that drives front page traffic. But as a HN user…

You should read Venture Deals! Great book by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson that's really comprehensive in this.