“It definitely feels a bit different. It's maybe a bit less intense, but you're managing more things cognitively. I'm thinking of ideas that normally would've taken me a week to experiment with. And I think of multiple of these experiments and then fire them off all simultaneously. [It feels as] if I was a college professor with a whole swarm of research assistants, and they're all off doing things and it's coming back really rapidly.”
Peter Mattis, Co-founder and CTO, Cockroach Labs. Founder who has written database-grade code for years and describes his own working practice; the account is his own, in an interview with a newsletter author.
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Matched word for word against the raw newsletter page fetched with curl (tags stripped), where the host presents it in quotation marks as Peter Mattis's words from the episode. The page's transcript was not read, so the spoken wording is not checked against the audio. Curly apostrophes normalized to straight. Bracketed words are the newsletter's own.
How to cite this passage
Peter Mattis (Cockroach Labs), “Distributed databases with Peter Mattis”, The Pragmatic Engineer (newsletter), 2026-09-30, at Takeaway 12. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/distributed-databases-with-peter Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/cockroach-labs-flow-different-college-professor-swarm-research-2026
Cockroach Labs