Sequences — brandur.org

103 — Piaynemo Geosite

2026-03-29T11:01:39-07:00

Piaynemo Geosite and its limestone islets in Raja Ampat. Dozens of karsts poke up above the water (porous rock worn down over millennia by rain and waves), and you’ll find some of the clearest water in the Pacific, beckoning you to jump in and snorkel around for a while. On Piaynemo’s “main” island there’s a dock and a few buildings making up a small park outpost, and attached to a tiny market specializing in coconuts, coconut oil, and instant ramen (?). From there, you can do a short hike up to the lookout where this photo was taken.

Poster for Nanoglyph 050, on the second wave of the API-first economy.

102 — Raja Ampat

2026-02-22T13:22:49-08:00

A marker just off the beach on the tiny island of Yeben in Raja Ampat. With its perfect beaches, crystal clear water, and gorgeous vegetation, Yeben is a prime candidate for paradise on Earth.

Poster for Nanoglyph 049, on the end of Heroku (?), things we could’ve done to stave off its untimely demise, and a brief trip report on diving in Raja Ampat.

101 — Lyon

2026-02-08T13:55:22-08:00

A bank of windows near our hotel in Lyon, France. We did a short team went on-site here last year to get the Snowflake Postgres project jumpstarted. Gorgeous city with incredible viewing opportunities.

Poster for Nanoglyph 048, with mixed thoughts on LLMs, Ambon, and psychedelic frogfish.

100 — First snow

2026-01-19T12:50:11-08:00

The backyard of the Stainless townhouse in Brooklyn on the morning of one of the first snows of the season.

Poster for Nanoglyph 047, on joining Stainless, six months at Snowflake, and Komodo dragons.

099 — Ambon

2025-10-17T06:44:08+09:00

Docking after a dive at Spice Island Divers, a resort in Ambon, Indonesia which muck dives exclusively. The downside of these dives is having to wade through the literal tons of trash Indonesians have thrown into the bay. The upside are the spottings of otherwise rare frogfish, searhorses, and rhinopias. Our grail fish for the week is the “psychadelic frogfish”, one of the most distinctive looking fish there is, and endemic to only this specific bay in Ambon.

Used as the poaster for my latest now page update, on Snowflake, Nanoglyph, San Francisco, and River.

098 — Over the hill

2025-10-09T06:45:12+08:00

A look down onto the bay where SCUBA Junkie Komodo is located after climbing the very large hill behind it. The footing around here looks better than it actually is, and as our feet disappeared below the deep grass, it was hard to stop thinking about the pit vipers that we’d been told lived in the “jungle” behind the resort. The air was still, and I was half-blind as half the sunscreen I’d unwisely applied to my face was now swimming in my eyes. We made it, just in time for our descent before the sun set.

Poster for Nanoglyph 046, a short issue on Kubernetes and progress through Indonesia.

097 — Loback Meat Co.

2025-09-28T22:48:37-07:00

Pike Place market in Seattle under a sign for the historic Loback Meat Co., circa 1946-1989. Gone 35 years now, but memorialized by a period neon sign that with luck, will last generations. I expected Pike Place to be busy, but on a beautiful Sunday before we enter the rainy season, it felt like half of downtown was in there. It didn’t surprise me to find cheese, flowers, and fish on sale, but the coin shop and magic shop were unexpected.

Poster for Nanoglyph 045, on a few features from Postgres 18 and a note on upcoming travel to Indonesia.

096 — STRAAT

2025-09-22T07:09:54-07:00

The STRAAT museum in Amsterdam Noord. A giant warehouse of 86k square feet showcasing ~180 of the best pieces of street art and graffiti.

Poster for Nanoglyph 044, on a visit to the STRAAT museum in Amsterdam Noord and thoughts on the iPhone Air.

095 — The Globe

2025-09-21T09:26:42-07:00

The welcome globe at Rails World, surrounded by a crowd just leaving from DHH’s opening keynote. As they’ve done in years past, this was an interactive exhibit where attendees could place a pin at their home location. You can see in this photo that there was a lone attendee from Anchorage.

Poster for Nanoglyph 043, on a visit to Amsterdam for Rails World 2025, CI loops measured in days + why to make sure that CI can run locally, and a visit to the Ruby Embassy at Beurs van Berlage.

094 — Sky blue

2025-04-04T14:01:42-07:00

A random shot of the high towers of the Financial District in downtown San Francisco. Used as the poster image for my latest now update, which touches lightly on journaling, OpenTelemetry, and transaction anomalies.

093 — Eighty-Eight

2024-12-29T16:14:26-07:00

I’ve been hearing about Eighty-Eight for years, but didn’t visit until yesterday. Named for the year ‘88 when Calgary hosted the Olympic winter games, it’s two levels of taprooms with the brewery on site right next door. An 80s vibe pervades the space, complete with tube TVs (bunny ears open wide), boombox, and retro console. The special holiday theme is Home Alone. See the infamous Wet Bandit duo on screen here, but also with themed menu, Kevin McCallister traps visible around the room, and flying fox line soaring above the brewery’s enormous stainless steel vats.

092 — Tori Bar

2024-12-20T12:56:01-07:00

This one was new for me, Tori Bar in Calgary’s Inglewood, a tiny place serving Japanese yakitori off a single grill, the skewers cooked right in front of your eyes. We ended up ordering roughly ³⁄₄ of the menu, I can heartily recommend the tako wasabi (octopus) starter, skin-on-thigh yakitori, pork belly, and shishamo (smelt, a tiny fish served well done).

091 — Fair's Fair

2024-12-19T20:29:08-07:00

I dropped by Fair’s Fair in Inglewood (Calgary) yesterday. It’s a large, rustic bookstore with bare bone furnishing, some real vintage items (in the sense of old rather expensive), and a big sci-fi/fantasy section. I’ve been coming to this place since I was a kid (when used book prices were measured in cents rather than dollars), and was glad that it’s the same Fair’s Fair in spirit as it was all the way back then.

090 — Overhead

2024-10-19T17:57:56-07:00

Skyscrapers overhead in downtown San Francisco. Poster for my latest now update.

089 — Rails World 2024

2024-10-06T13:17:03-07:00

Rails World 2024 at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto. Poster photo for my write up on the conference.

088 — Royal lion hunt

2024-10-06T09:40:45-07:00

I visited the British Museum in London during my stay there last year. The museum has a wealth of ancient artifacts, including some of the most famous ones in history like the Rosetta Stone, but despite having my camera with me, I took few photos while I was there. All I could think of was the tens of thousands of times each of these objects was photographed every day, contributing to an enormous body of billions of photos, 99.9999% would never be glanced again.

This is one of the few artifacts I photographed because I liked it so much. It’s artwork on stone depicting Assyrian royals taking part in a lion hunt, circa 645 BC, right around the period where the civilization would collapse.

At the time I knew almost nothing about Assyria, but a friend sent over the excellent episode “Empire of Iron” from Paul Cooper’s Fall of Civilizations podcast (also you YouTube). It starts describing how the Greek general Xenophon came across the ruins of two colossal cities as he was returning from a battle in 401 BC. We know now that these were the Assyrian cities Kalhu and Nineveh, but by then (about 200 years post-collapse) locals knew nothing about them, despite their far greater scope and sophistication than anything they could build at the time. It would’ve been like living amongst ancient ruins built by giants.

087 — Transamerica

2024-10-05T18:16:40-07:00

Closed for four years, the redwood park and sculpture garden at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid reopened a few weeks ago. Featuring a reflecting pool and outdoor ping pong, it’s a tranquil oasis in the heart of the financial district. I wouldn’t say it’s a destination unto itself, but if you’re traveling from the waterfront up to North Beach or vice versa, it’s worth dropping into for a few minutes to check out.

086 — County Highway

2024-09-22T14:50:44-07:00

I’ve been very casually searching for a copy of County Highway since they started publishing a year ago. It’s a great concept – a paper only newspaper published on American-centric topics in a traditional style. The County Highway website publishes a list of bookstores and shops where it’s available, but I’d tried a few of the ones in San Francisco and came up empty. On a bike ride today I did a short detour over to Mollusk Surf Shop by the Great Walkway (a beautiful little store), and there sitting on the table, a whole stack of them. At last.

085 — BER

2024-06-01T10:13:48-07:00

Sadly, my time in Berlin has come to an end.

My way out is through the Berlin Brandenburg airport (BER), my first flying out of it. I visited Berlin last year, but took the train in and out both directions.

Germany’s traditional reptuation from my youth was as a country known for its precise, efficient engineering, a reputation that’s been slowly backsliding over the intervening decades, with this airport perhaps the most conspicuous symbol of that process.

Construction started in 2006, with an opening target of 2011. I remember visiting Berlin for the first time in December 2011 and being told that the next time I came through, I’d be landing at the city’s magnificent new airport. But over the next decade, the oft seen mix of incompetence, graft, and regulation delayed opening a half dozen times until October 2020, a decade behind schedule, and ballooning its original €2.83B budget to €10.3B, with another billion EUR or so of loans still planned.

The good news is that Berlin finally has a decent airport, with Schönefeld and Tegel previously leaving a lot to be desired (although I did speak to someone last week who passionately argued that Tegel was one of the best airports in use, a point on which I vehemently disagreed, but was substantiated with reasonable arguments). It’s spacious, with reasonably efficient check-in counters and security checks (my sample size of is one, so take that with a grain of sault). It’s connected to not only the S-bahn, but the Deutsche Bahn network, with a direct regional train between it and Ostkreuz that’s only a 20 minute ride (in fact, DB sued the airport as the station it built in 2011 sat unused for years).

I appreciated that the airport’s builders borrowed themes from Berlin architecture elsewhere, with a huge open plaza (“airport city”), and giant megalithic pillars holding up the structure overhead. So big and so high that they’re ominous to look at.

084 — Spherical abberation

2024-06-01T08:56:37-07:00

Another one in the vein of 083, from the same walk in Bridgeland last December over to Shiki Menya for some ramen. I’m posting it now because I’m likely to forget about it again otherwise.

Calgary’s cold during the winter, but a fact that’d surprise many is that it’s actually the sunniest major city in Canada with ~333 days of sunshine a year. Even on days like this where it’s not sunny, the light still comes through beautifully, and makes for some great photography.