Medium

Thomas F McGeehan V

Pinned

Thomas F McGeehan V

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Mar 31

Beneath the Kernel Lies the Kingdom

A warning smuggled inside a story

Surreal cross-section of a CPU chip revealing a glowing medieval kingdom deep within its silicon layers, with a shadowy king on a circuit-board throne symbolizing the hidden Intel Management Engine and MINIX running beneath the operating system kernel — evoking the warning that beneath the kernel lies an unaccountable kingdom of firmware control.

Pinned

Thomas F McGeehan V

·

Jun 19, 2025

The Quiet Little Engine Behind Fast SQL

Introducing Porter

A minimalist terminal window displays the text: “Porter server starting on :32010” and “DuckDB backend ready.” Beside it, a sleek, stylized engine emits a soft glow, symbolizing quiet speed and precision. A small ASCII-style cat sits calmly next to the terminal, evoking simplicity and charm. The scene suggests efficient software that just works — fast, lightweight, and quietly powerful.

Pinned

Thomas F McGeehan V

·

Jun 9, 2025

The Lakehouse Is Dead. Long Live the Lakehouse

How complexity became the product

Split cartoon image contrasting two data architectures. Left panel labeled “Lakehouse” shows a boot sinking into a muddy swamp with a shovel and a “Metadata Swamp” warning sign. Right panel labeled “Lean Stack” shows a cheerful duck standing on grass under a rainbow, labeled “DuckDB.”

Pinned

Thomas F McGeehan V

·

May 28, 2025

DuckTales: A DuckLake Story

Rethinking the Lakehouse with a Duck and a Plan

DuckTales: A DuckLake Story

Pinned

Thomas F McGeehan V

·

May 29, 2025

Quacks & Stacks

DuckLake’s One‑Table Wonder vs Iceberg’s Manifest Maze

Quacks & Stacks

Thomas F McGeehan V

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Apr 10

APIs Are Environments Now

Rethinking System Design for Agents

APIs Are Environments Now

Thomas F McGeehan V

·

Apr 9

Protobuf -> Arrow in One Hop

Then the Bottleneck Finally Moved Where It Belongs

Minimalist tech illustration for the article “Protobuf → Arrow in One Hop”. Shows a clean Protobuf binary icon on the left connected by a single elegant arrow to an Apache Arrow columnar icon on the right, with the title text centered above on a white background. Simple, modern, and professional.

Thomas F McGeehan V

·

Apr 7

How to Use Coding Agents Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Codebase)

There’s a scene in The Simpsons where Ralph Wiggum, handed a task he doesn’t understand, confidently declares “I’m helping!” while doing…

Ralph Wiggum as a clueless “Coding Agent” at a desk full of burning code and failed builds, proudly declaring “I’M HELPING!” in classic Simpsons cartoon style.

Thomas F McGeehan V

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Apr 7

Arrow, Pandas, and DuckDB on Federated Data

How I Learned to Stop Optimizing the Wiring

Minimalist three-panel illustration for the article: Pandas shows a tired panda tangled in messy wires and data sources with a slow hourglass; Pandas + Arrow shows the same panda but with neat “Arrow” wiring — still slow; DuckDB shows a confident duck with one clean, fast pipeline and lightning bolt. Captures the lesson “stop optimizing the wiring.” Clean flat vector style.

Thomas F McGeehan V

·

Apr 6

The Last Generation That Read the Code

Image generated using Imagine

Minimalist black-and-white split illustration: left side shows handwritten code on parchment with thought bubbles, arrows, and connecting lines representing shared public debugging and understanding; right side shows clean AI-generated code flowing from neural patterns to a digital screen with fading human connections, symbolizing the transition from code written to be read to code generated to be run.

Thomas F McGeehan V

Thomas F McGeehan V

Code by instinct. Essays by experiment. www.github.com/TFMV

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