Update (Feb 18, 2026): After a productive discussion on Reddit and additional benchmarking, I found that the solutions I originally proposed (batched writes or using a synchronous connection) don't actually help. The real issue is simpler and more fundamental than I described: SQLite is single-writer, so any amount...

Write transactions can lead to lock starvation and serious performance degradation when using SQLite with SQLx, the popular async Rust SQL library. In retrospect, I feel like this should have been obvious, but it took a little more staring at suspiciously consistent "slow statement" logs than I'd like to admit, so...

Hi friends, In January, Scour scoured 805,241 posts from 16,555 feeds (939 were newly added). I also rolled out a lot of new features that I'm excited to tell you about. Maybe because of some of these, I found more posts than usual that I thought were especially worth sharing. You can find them at the bottom of this...

Stripe is famous for having some of the best product docs, largely because they are "designed to feel like an application rather than a traditional user manual". I spent much of the last week building and writing the docs for Scour, and I am quite proud of the results. Interactive DocsScour is a personalized content...

I thought about sending out a personalized "Scour Wrapped"... until I got the 7th Wrapped from some random service. So instead, I'll just say Happy New Year and thanks for your support in 2025! 🥂 2025 By the Numbers Scour scoured 9,940,460 posts from 15,608 feeds 1,013 new users signed up (welcome!!) 12,620...

I recently added domain exclusion lists and paywalled content filtering to Scour. This blog post describes a small but useful SQL(ite) query optimization I came across between the first and final drafts of these features: using an uncorrelated scalar subquery to skip a correlated subquery (if you don't know what...

Interests, interests, interests.

Better interest recommendations, reading history, reaction links, flags, and more.

Understanding query planner quirks yielded a ~35% speedup.

Infinite scroll, emoji tags, email digests, and more!

Last week, I wrote up a little announcement post about Scour on the r/RSS subreddit. I'm copying that post over here for anyone else that might be interested: Hi everyone, A service I'm building has been mentioned a couple of times in this subreddit and it's now in a spot where I want to 'officially' tell you all...

I enjoy doing escape rooms and was planning to do a couple of them with a group of friends this weekend. The very minor and not-very-important challenge, however, was that I couldn't figure out how to assign friends to rooms. I want to do at least one room with each person, different people are arriving and leaving...