Veteran Software Engineer Opens Up on Burnout, Layoff, and Career Rebuilding

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Cesar Aguirre, a software engineer with over 10 years of experience, hosted an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on DEV Community on July 20. Aguirre shared his personal journey through illness, professional burnout, and a layoff that disrupted his career. He discussed how writing therapy has become a coping mechanism and revealed he is working on a new book trilogy. The AMA drew significant engagement, receiving 87 reactions from the community. Aguirre indicated he may host another AMA session in the future.

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Baidu's Unlimited-OCR Parses 40-Page PDFs in One Pass With Flat Memory Use

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Engineer Streams USB Mouse Over WiFi Using Netevent and Systemd

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

PostgreSQL Cursors Slash Export Times by Replacing Random Reads with Sequential Scans

A data pipeline exporting hundreds of gigabytes from PostgreSQL in 2,000-row batches was running far slower than expected, with the bottleneck traced to how the database read data from disk. Using a WHERE id > X LIMIT 2000 pattern caused Postgres to perform up to 2,000 random page lookups per batch via a B-tree index, forcing the disk head to constantly seek across different locations. Switching to a server-side cursor allowed Postgres to scan the heap sequentially, reading each 8KB page exactly once and enabling the OS to prefetch ahead predictably. This change required no schema modifications — only a different query pattern — yet dramatically reduced I/O overhead at scale. However, cursors hold an open transaction for their entire duration, which can block vacuum and inflate write-ahead logs on very large or long-running exports.

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