More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met

In this episode, JD sits down with Amanda Nystrom, CEO of Command Prompt and National Board Certified Health & Wellbeing Coach, to talk about wellness for people in tech and why most advice misses the point. Rather than focusing on quick fixes, discipline, or one-size-fits-all tools, Amanda explains why awareness has to come first. They explore how environment, nervous system load, work cultur...

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions. In this episode, Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Lev Kokotov, creator of PGDog, about one of the hardest problems in PostgreSQL: horizontal scaling in real production systems. Lev shares lessons learned from scaling Postgres at Instacart during periods of extreme growth, and why existing approaches often fail when applied to large, establish...

Welcome to Episode 54 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Kevin Jernigan to talk about AI hype versus reality, the real limits of scaling large language models, and why more data centers don’t necessarily mean smarter systems. They explore the economic and technical constraints behind today’s AI boom, what current models get fundamentally wrong, and what it would take to move beyond pa...

In this episode, JD sits down with Brian Fehrle to unpack a deceptively simple PostgreSQL operation that can trigger serious performance issues: adding a new column with a default value. Brian explains how PostgreSQL’s optimization—introduced to avoid table rewrites and long locks—can leave data “virtual” rather than physically written to disk. While this makes schema changes faster, it can quietl...

In this episode, JD is joined by Alan Lazaros for a conversation about systems, consistency, and the long game behind meaningful progress. While most people focus on big breakthroughs, this discussion explores how small, intentional actions—repeated daily—compound into exponential results over time. Drawing from personal experience and years of coaching, Alan reflects on health, wealth, relationsh...

In this AWS-focused episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with James Campbell about one of the most common (and most expensive) sources of cloud surprises: storage choices. James breaks down how AWS offers an overwhelming number of options across EBS, S3, and Glacier tiers, and why “flexibility” often translates into misconfiguration, avoidable spend, and hidden performance bottl...

In this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Glauber Costa about AgentFS, a virtual file system designed to solve one of the hardest problems in modern AI infrastructure: managing state and data isolation for fast-moving, sandboxed AI agents. Glauber explains how AgentFS treats the data layer as part of the sandbox itself, enabling agents to snapshot, move, and resume execu...

JD welcomes back Andrew Sullivan, former Chair of the Internet Architecture Board and former President & CEO of the Internet Society. Listen in as they continue their conversation on the “enshittification” of the internet, how consolidation and regulation are reshaping a network built on open standards, and why we may be closer than we think to losing the internet as we once knew it.

JD sits down with Amanda Nystrom to explore an often-overlooked reality in the tech industry: wellness is not a personal side concern—it’s a performance issue. Drawing parallels between system audits, Postgres health checks, and human behavior, Amanda explains why teams can’t expect long-term reliability, scalability, or high performance if they ignore the health of the people behind the systems....

In this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Andrew Smith, Senior Developer/DBA, about a foundational concept in software engineering that quietly powers modern systems: code generation and single sources of truth. Andrew walks through the evolution of code generation—from early macros and assembly language to modern model-driven architectures—and explains why generating co...

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions. In this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Justin Graf, Senior DBA & Engineer at Command Prompt, about a topic every Postgres team needs to understand: why monitoring alone isn’t enough—and why full logging is essential for diagnosing database problems. Justin explains how organizations often rely solely on m...

In this special AWS-focused T3D segment, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with Greg Dostatni, Senior DBA at Command Prompt, to unpack a topic that every team running PostgreSQL in the cloud eventually needs to face: how your AWS decisions today shape your flexibility, cost, and vendor dependencies tomorrow. Drawing on years of experience with platform migrations, cloud transition...

James breaks down the difference between checking the box for compliance and implementing meaningful, real-world security. From encryption-at-rest misunderstandings to SQL injection vulnerabilities that still plague organizations today, he explains why companies often miss the point — and how to approach security controls in a way that actually protects your data. If you’ve ever felt stuck in endl...

Welcome to Episode 13 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions! In this session, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with Kevin Jernigan, Chief Product Officer at J4 Capital LLC, whose career spans decades across the world’s biggest database and cloud companies. Kevin walks us through his journey from Oracle, AWS (Aurora PostgreSQL), MongoDB (Atlas Serverless), and Google Cloud...

Welcome to Episode 14 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D SessionsCommand Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Valerii Herman, Python Developer at Command Prompt, about Cython — a superset of Python that combines Python’s simplicity with C’s performance. Valerii explains how Cython lets developers keep the readability of Python while selectively compiling performance-heavy sectio...

Welcome to Episode 11 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D SessionsCommand Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Eugene Dubinin, Senior Developer & Project Lead at Command Prompt, about strategies for fighting web application registration spam — a problem they faced firsthand while maintaining the Postgres Conference website. Eugene explains why simple measures like CAPTCHAs an...

Welcome to Episode 10 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Andrew Sullivan — President of Anvil Walrus Den Holdings, Inc. and longtime Internet engineer and policy leader. Andrew explains how the open, decentralized Internet envisioned by its founders is being reshaped by the dominance of just a handful of tech giants. From Canada’s poli...

Welcome to Episode 9 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D SessionsIn this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with Hunter O’Brien, Jr Sysadmin/Jr DBA at Command Prompt, to talk about why monitoring isn’t one-size-fits-all. They explore how out-of-the-box tools often give shallow insights, and why teams should leverage their QA and test environments to improve production mon...

Welcome to Episode 8 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions. Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Silona Bonewald, Open Source Standards Pioneer and InnerSource Expert, about 10 things you didn’t know about blockchain. Silona takes a historical and systemic look at how blockchain emerged long before Bitcoin, and why its uses go far beyond cryptocurrency.

Welcome to Episode 6 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions. Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with his colleague Brian Fehrle, DBA at Command Prompt, to dive into one of the toughest challenges for fast-growing applications: scaling your database without breaking the bank. Brian shares real-world lessons on what happens when traffic spikes, why simply “throwing more hardwa...

Welcome to Episode 5 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Alan Chavez — Product Engineer specialized in Growth, and Chief Technology Officer at Torta Studios — about the practice of growth engineering and how data-driven decisions shape the success of new products. Alan shares how retention and activation metrics drive real business outc...

Welcome to Episode 4 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Greg Dostatni, DBA at Command Prompt, about the Kubernetes mantra “cattle, not pets” — and why that doesn’t always hold true when it comes to PostgreSQL databases. They explore why stateless services scale easily in Kubernetes, but databases face serious challenges aroun...

Welcome to Episode 3 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake sits down with Dr. Aaron N. Cutshall, Principal Data Architect at SQLRV, LLC., to discuss the power and performance benefits of set-based processing in relational databases like PostgreSQL. With database experience dating back to the 1980s, Aaron shares why set-based thinking is disappearing...

Welcome to Episode 2 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Victor Olex, Founder and CEO of SlashDB — a platform that instantly turns databases into RESTful APIs with support for JSON, XML, CSV, and even a full HTML-based UI for exploring and querying data. They explore how SlashDB stands out in a crowded API ecosystem — including in compa...

Welcome to Episode 1 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Tushar Pednekar, Co-founder of Synx Data Labs, about Apache CloudBerry — a new open source, Postgres-based analytics platform designed to scale from terabytes to petabytes. They explore how CloudBerry offers a true open-source alternative to legacy systems like Greenplum, the impo...