Developer Voices · 2026-02-04 · 1h 41m
Eighteen months ago, Tyler Cloutier appeared on the show with what sounded like an ambitious (some might say crazy) plan: build a new distributed database from scratch, then use it to power a massively multiplayer online game. That's two of the hardest problems in software, tackled simultaneously. But sometimes the best infrastructure comes from solving your own impossible problems. The game, Bitcraft, has now launched on Steam. SpacetimeDB has hit version 1.0. And Tyler returns to share what actually happened when theory met production reality. We cover the launch day performance disasters (including a cascading failure caused by logging while holding a lock), why single-threaded execution running entirely from L1 cache can outperform sophisticated multi-threaded approaches by two orders of magnitude, and how the database's reducer model - borrowed from functional programming - enables zero-downtime code deployments. We also get into how SpacetimeDB is expanding beyond games with TypeScript support and React hooks that make building real-time multiplayer web apps surprisingly simple.
What's Worth Knowing In AI Right Now? (with Henry Garner)80 / 100Asciinema: Terminal Recording Done Right (with Marcin Kulik)Will Turso Be The Better SQLite? (with Glauber Costa)Can Google's ADK Replace LangChain and MCP? (with Christina Lin)Building Observable Systems with eBPF and Linux (with Mohammed Aboullaite)