Bright ideas and techniques for building with Convex.
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Jamie Turner

Jamie is a co-founder and the CEO of Convex.

Prior to Convex, Jamie was a Senior Engineering Director at Dropbox, leading the Business Platform and the Storage / Databases groups. Earlier in his tenure at Dropbox, Jamie was a Principal Engineer, launching several significant projects in synchronization and storage with his Convex co-founders James and Sujay. Over ten years before Dropbox, Jamie held leadership positions at several startups, most recently as the Head of Engineering at Bump, a former top-10 mobile app acquired by Google in 2013.

Jamie brings to Convex an enduring obsession with databases, networking, and protocols. Over the course of his career, he’s created dozens of related open-source projects, collectively with thousands of GitHub stars and heavy industry use.

All posts by Jamie

Convex: The Software-Defined Database
Which to choose, the expressive power of code, or the robustness of built-in database features? With Convex, you can have both. By eliminating the boundary between the application and the database, Convex provides a uniform and powerful way to model your entire backend data flow and security using plain ol' code.
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Jamie Turner
2 months ago
Building a full-stack AI storybook app with LangChain, Replicate, and OpenAI
So you have a pretty good grasp on web development, but you want to learn more about building with generative AI? You're not alone. In this live-coding course, follow along as we build a full-stack generative AI app using LangChain.js, Replicate, and OpenAI.
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Jamie Turner
a year ago
Convex gets Rusty with Santa
If you've been itching to write Convex programs in Rust, your time has come. We take the new Convex Rust crate for a spin by writing a distributed system simulation of Santa and his team working together at the North Pole. Yes, really.
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Jamie Turner
a year ago
Searching for Sanity
Your document is safely stored, but search is coming up empty? Inconsistent search systems can really confuse users! Don't worry–in Convex, transactional search indexing ensures that users always get what they expect and your apps just work.
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Jamie Turner
a year ago
It's not you, it's SQL
SQL has been a part of computing for a very long time, and SQL-based database systems underly most of the world's applications. But recently, developers have been clamoring for something better, and it's time to move on.
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Jamie Turner
a year ago
Edge to Butt: Wrappers as "Middleware"
Convex middleware serves many purposes. Sometimes authentication, sometimes i18n. This time? Making sense (or nonsense) of emerging technology industry trends.
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Jamie Turner
a year ago
Don't Drop ACID
When your database supports ACID semantics, you're free to write code the intuitive way and ignore the complexities of concurrency and failure.
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Jamie Turner
a year ago
Convex and the future of streaming infrastructure
Hosted by Ian & Alex, with Alana (Readyset), Hojjat (Deltastream), Jamie (Convex).
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Jamie Turner
a year ago
Managing Reactivity with useBufferedState
Reactivity has taken a dominant position today within web app development. Our components and app state are all reactive, and the world has adapted–most would argue, for the better. But has Convex gone too far? 😉 A new generation of serverless backends like Convex is recklessly spreading reactivity across our databases, server-side functions, and protocols, making global reactivity a new phenomenon. Shared global data is becoming reactive by default. Is this good for the world? In this video, Jamie Turner explores one circumstance where this pervasive reactivity poses a challenge, and he builds one useful abstraction for taming over-reactivity and turning it back into a strength.
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Jamie Turner
2 years ago
Backend Matters (Making Fast5 #2)
Why does anything really need to run on the server anymore? And even if it does, do I, the developer, need to be so involved? Yes! Even in a serverless world, the backend computing context being a real, discrete environment that you have control and influence over is not only necessary but hugely beneficial.
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Jamie Turner
2 years ago
Local and Remote State (Making Fast5 #1)
While making Fast5, Convex's wordle-style multiplayer racing game, we ran into several interesting challenges. This week, let's dig into managing the combination of local and global state.
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Jamie Turner
2 years ago
Introducing Fast5
At Convex, we're creating a platform for managing global state for web developers. Unsurprisingly, we've found one of the best ways to improve our platform is to actually build stuff with it!
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Jamie Turner
2 years ago
The unfulfilled promise of functional ideals on the web
Ideas around immutability, purity, and dataflow programming are quietly saturating our technologies like Bitcoin and React. And while these early inroads are enabling exciting new ways to build large and dependable applications, there is still much to do to realize the full potential of this revolution.
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Jamie Turner
2 years ago