Peter Mattis, co-founder of Cockroach Labs and creator of GIMP, discusses his career building large-scale systems like Gmail’s storage backend and Google’s Colossus file system. He explains the critical role of B-trees in database design and details how AI coding models now enable him to produce high-quality, production-ready code at an unprecedented rate. The episode also covers his insights on distributed storage, erasure coding, and why AI agents often struggle with testing.
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