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PODCAST

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

More than a Refresh is a new podcast dedicated to learning about data and the people behind it through lively conversation, diverse topics, and engaging guest speakers. We explore professional trends within the ecosystem including trouble spots, privacy, equity, democratization, and future directions. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

technology

All Episodes

00:11:42

MTAR T3D Sessions: Tech Rescue and the Rise of the...

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2026/03/24

In this episode, JD sits down with Andrew Bolton, Co-Founder and CEO of Tech Rescue, to explore what happens when a hyper-connected world leaves millions behind. What starts as a conversation about 24-hour technical support quickly expands into something bigger: access to healthcare, logistics, and the growing gap between technology’s capabilities and real human support.Andrew explains how 80 million Americans have been left behind by rapid technological change, including 16 million without reliable

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00:10:39

MTAR T3D Sessions: Designing AWS IAM Policies Without...

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2026/03/19

In this episode, JD sits down with Hunter O’Brien to break down one of the most misunderstood areas of AWS: Identity and Access Management (IAM). Designing policies sounds straightforward, until wildcards, over-permissioned roles, and unclear resource access create real risk in production.Hunter explains how the AWS IAM Policy Simulator allows teams to safely test roles before they reach production. By simulating API calls without affecting live systems or billing, organizations can design

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00:50:01

MTAR 55: Age Verification Laws, Online Privacy and...

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2026/03/12

Welcome to episode 55 of More Than a Refresh. In this episode, JD Drake talks with Samantha Baldwin, Policy & Research Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), about the growing push for age verification laws in the United States.These proposals are often framed as protecting children online. But what do they actually require from operating systems, platforms, and users? They discuss how these laws work, why many may be technically ineffective, and what the long term

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00:11:34

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why Postgres Is So Hard to Change

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2026/03/10

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, JD sits down with Yurii Rashkovskii to unpack a frustration many experienced engineers quietly share: why is Postgres so difficult to evolve?The conversation centers on architecture. From tightly coupled storage and transaction layers to row-oriented execution models, Yurii explains why experimenting with new storage engines or fundamentally different designs inside Postgres is far from simple. What looks modular on the surface often reveals deep

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00:11:19

MTAR T3D Sessions: When Should You Actually Use the...

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2026/03/05

In this episode, JD sits down with Command Prompt CIO Ildefonso Camargo to challenge a common assumption in modern infrastructure: if you can afford the cloud, why wouldn’t you use it?What starts as a simple cost comparison turns into a deeper discussion about accounting realities, hardware depreciation, staffing requirements, compliance, and operational risk. Ildefonso shares what sparked the conversation—seeing a large enterprise sign a long-term cloud contract with a massive monthly bill—and

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00:12:31

MTAR T3D Sessions: Missing pieces of wellness

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2026/02/24

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 culture, and internal narratives all shape health outcomes, often more than diet or exercise alone.

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00:12:53

MTAR T3D Sessions: Scaling PostgreSQL Without...

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2026/02/19

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, established applications. They explore what happens when rewriting millions of lines of code simply isn’t an

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01:15:40

MTAR 54: AI Hype vs Reality, Scaling Limits, and What...

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2026/02/12

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 pattern matching toward something more meaningful.

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00:10:05

MTAR T3D Sessions: RDS Lowers the Barrier—Not the Risk

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2026/02/10

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 quietly confuse the query planner, skew statistics, and turn previously fast queries into production problems,

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00:14:14

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why Small Wins Create Exponential...

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2026/02/05

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, relationships, and fulfillment as interconnected systems. Rather than chasing intensity or quick wins, the episode

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00:12:10

How Your AWS Storage Decisions Shape Cost,...

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2026/01/27

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 bottlenecks.They also dig into a frequent pain point: backups and snapshots. JD and James explain what people

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00:11:06

MTAR T3D Sessions: How AgentFS Rethinks State,...

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2026/01/22

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 execution in milliseconds without relying on heavy infrastructure.They explore why traditional systems become

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01:24:46

MTAR 53: Enshittification, Open Standards, and the...

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2026/01/15

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.

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00:12:15

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why Wellness is Key to Performance...

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2026/01/13

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. Just as neglected infrastructure leads to outages and technical debt, ignored habits and burnout

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00:10:27

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why Code Generation Still Matters

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2026/01/08

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 code from a centralized definition is one of the most effective ways to build scalable, maintainable

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00:10:27

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why Monitoring Isn’t Enough: The...

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2025/12/19

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 monitoring tools like PGStatStatements, CloudWatch, or Datadog, without realizing that these tools can’t

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00:12:28

MTAR Presents: T3D Sessions with Greg Dostatni (DBA)...

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2025/12/04

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 transitions, and large-scale infrastructure projects, Greg explains why AWS is powerful and convenient—but not

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00:13:00

MTAR Presents: T3D Sessions with James Campbell of...

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2025/11/20

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 endless compliance meetings, wrestled with vague requirements like “encryption at rest,” or questioned

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00:13:33

MTAR Presents: T3D Sessions with Kevin Jernigan of J4...

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2025/11/13

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, reflecting on what it meant to “reinvent the wheel” in database engineering — and why he ultimately

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00:10:59

MTAR Presents: T3D Sessions with Valerii Herman of...

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2025/10/30

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 sections into C extensions. Beyond speed, he shares how Cython can also be used for code obfuscation, making it

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87 results

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