Top all-time · #1769
Rob Conery
Personal blog · bigmachine.ioprogrammingai
Rob Conery writes Big Machine, a personal blog at bigmachine.io about programming and ai. Since 2016, 44 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “A Curious Moon”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Free: the Claude Playbook. The skills, agents, and commands Rob Conery uses every day to keep AI writing code that holds up. SOLID, BDD specs, and no repositories anywhere.
Most-linked posts?
- /products/the-imposters-handbook/13 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2017-01-15
- A Curious Moon10 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2018-05-14
- /products/the-imposters-handbook5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-11-12
- /products/take-off-with-elixir/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-12-22
- Learn PostgreSQL on the Job at Red:42 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-19
- Creating a full text search engine in PostgreSQL 142 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-06-13
What Hacker News says?
'The Imposters Handbook' is good for foundational knowledge, it was written for exactly your use case. https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook/
on “Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into”Submitted A Curious Moon as a story · 64 points
HN discussionA Curios Moon - a data science mystery that teaches you PostgreSQL by working on projects that use real nasa data sets in a fictional setting (your role as a data science intern at red:4) https://bigmachine.io/products/a-curious-moon/
Comment linking /products/a-curious-moon/
on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?”Submitted It’s Time to Get over That Stored Procedure Aversion You Have (2015) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI liked Take Off With Elixir, by Rob Conery. It walks you through writing a program for a fictional aerospace start-up. It also comes with a 3-hour companion video, which is good too. https://bigmachine.io/products/take-off-with-elixir/
Comment linking /products/take-off-with-elixir/
on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?”Submitted Imposter's Handbook – Essential Skills and Concepts for the Self-Taught Programmer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHas anyone read "The Impostor Handbook"[0]? What do you think of it? [0] https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/ Edit: I'm not connected to the book.
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook/
on “Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?”Submitted Creating a full text search engine in PostgreSQL 14 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionas a "senior" business programmer with non-engineering studies (I have a deegree in byology), I'm feeling an impostor reading this and admitting that I'm unable to understand basically everything... even https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/ not helped too much
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook/
on “FizzleFade”Submitted Exploring the Cassini Mission Data Using Postgres [Book] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRob Conery's A Curious Moon ( https://bigmachine.io/products/a-curious-moon/ ) is an interesting read for a PostgreSQL book. I wouldn't say it tries to be an advanced book by design, but I learned a lot of modern SQL from it. I think the number of people needing truly advanced books is small whereas a lot of people need to jump from beginners to intermediate, or intermediate to advanced.
Comment linking /products/a-curious-moon/
on “Advanced SQL and database books and resources”Submitted Learn PostgreSQL the Fun Way: A Curious Moon as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'll highly recommend "A Curious Moon" by Rob Conery [0]. In this book you'll load Cassini space mission data from NASA into Postgres and analyze one of the Saturn's moon. I learnt a lot about Postgres and also about satellite data. [0] https://bigmachine.io/products/a-curious-moon/
Comment linking /products/a-curious-moon/
on “Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?”Submitted Learn PostgreSQL on the Job at Red:4 as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"The Imposter's Handbook" might be something worth checking out... https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook/
on “Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems”Submitted Going Serverless with Firebase as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPosting this since I don't see it mentioned yet. Scott Hanselman and Rob Conery created the Imposters Handbook. I believe both of these guys are self-taught, and they are incredibly good at what they do. They put it together precisely for self taught developers with no formal CS background. https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/ https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook-season...
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook-season-2/
on “Ask HN: How Sound Is the “Teach Yourself CS” Learning Resource?”Submitted PostgreSQL Tools for the Visually Inclined (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm having a lot of fun with it, can't wait for winter vacation to build stuff :) There's a lot of niceties you get out of the box (mix is pretty nice and the testing framework is included, the REPL is good, love that they improve the error messages and consider an unclear error message a bug). I'm already used to pattern matching from Prolog so that's a great plus (I wanted to use Erlang initially but Elixir has wo…
Comment linking /products/take-off-with-elixir/
on “Why the Elixir language has great potential”Submitted A Curious Moon as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI share the author's optimism. I work for a start-up, and we just released a mobile app that uses Elixir on the back end. I'm the architect on the project, and this was my first time using Elixir professionally. I've been blown away by the speed and stability of the product, the ease of hot deployments, and the intuitiveness of Elixir's syntax. Behaviors are amazing, and for the first time in my career, concurrency…
Comment linking /products/take-off-with-elixir/
on “Why the Elixir language has great potential”Submitted Exploring the Cassini Mission Data While Learning Postgres as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSound like a need for a “imposters handbook” for Mathematics, just like there is for Computer Science: https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook
on “Confession as an AI researcher; seeking advice”Submitted A Curious Moon: Exploring Cassini's Data with PostgreSQL as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI would highly recommend Imposter's Handbook[1] by Rob Conery Then there is also excellent BaseCS Podcast [2] [1] https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook [2] https://www.codenewbie.org/basecs
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook
on “Ask HN: What book to read to get a footing in CS theory?”Submitted The Imposter’s Handbook 700+ pages of essentials skills and ideas as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe Impostor's Handbook https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/ has been helpful for me. Been using it to supplement learning from a coding bootcamp.
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook/
on “Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS”Submitted Going Solo: A Blueprint for Going Out on Your Own as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA couple friends of mine in similar situations spoke very highly of The Imposter's Handbook ( https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/ ) I have a CS degree and I still really enjoyed reading through the 1st ed. of the first volume. I haven't looked at what was done with the material since then.
Comment linking /products/the-imposters-handbook/
on “Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS”Submitted The Imposter's Handbook as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
