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The Pragmatic Engineer

The Pragmatic Engineer

Distributed databases with Peter Mattis

Sep 30, 2026 · 1h 42m

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Brought to You By: • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable • Linear – the product development system for teams and agents • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — How is it that a software veteran who regularly shipped ~100K of database-grade code to production each year, pre-AI, feels like he’s even more productive today, with no drop in quality? Peter Mattis is co-founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs , and an original creator of GIMP. He also worked on Gmail and distributed storage at Google. In this episode, Peter reflects on his journey from open source to Google to founding a database…