Robin Moffatt
rmoff.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Robin Moffatt, a data engineer, writes about data tooling, streaming, developer writing, and the effects of LLMs on engineering work.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for his DuckDB walkthrough of a data challenge, with timings close to theirs, and for his post on AI slop on Medium.
25HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
61stories submitted
410story points
6 months agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S36 people · 9 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 2Blog Writing for Developers (2023)5 people · 262 points · first shared 2023 · 43 comments on HN
- 3AI Smells on Medium4 people · 13 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 4AI Slop Is Killing Online Communities2 people · 13 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 5I Try to Keep Up with the Data Tech World (A List of Data Blogs)2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6A Love Letter to Raycast2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7Ten years late to the dbt party (DuckDB edition)2 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 8Reflections of a Developer on LLMs in January 20262 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 9Monitoring Sonos with KsqlDB, InfluxDB, and Grafana2 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 10Claude Code isn't going to replace data engineers (yet)2 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 11I got Claude to teach me dbt2 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 121BRC in SQL with DuckDB2 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 13Exploring UK Environment Agency Data with DuckDB and Rill1 people · 29 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Spotting Astroturfing on Reddit1 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 15I've been thinking about Agents and MCP all wrong1 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
NortySpock · 2024-01-29
As a SQL-head, I enjoyed following along with Robin Moffatt's blog on doing the challenge with DuckDB. I got slightly slower numbers than he did (I have different hardware), but definitely in the same order of magnitude. He got 28 seconds to ingest the CSV, then 6 seconds to aggregate and calculate.
Maybe 2 hours of coding, tops
https://rmoff.net/2024/01/03/1%EF%B8%8F%E2%83%A3%EF%B8%8F-1brc-in-sql-…
O_H_E · 2025-11-27
There was recently this link talking about AI slop articles on medium
https://rmoff.net/2025/11/25/ai-smells-on-medium/
He doesn't link many examples, but at the end he gives the example of an author pumping out +8 articles in a week across a variety of topics. https://medium.com/@ArkProtocol1
I don't spend time on medium so I don't personally know.
jovezhong · 2023-09-22
"Turns out, stream processing was only really just getting started. In the last 12-18 months a veritable plethora of stream processing projects and companies have shown up, demonstrating that there is not only demand for it but also different approaches to take too." https://rmoff.net/2023/09/21/an-itch-that-just-has-to-be-scratched-or-…
Feel free to check out OSS Proton: github.com/timeplus-io/proton, and let me know any documentation/design need to be updated to make it a bit clearer