This is part one of a five-part series on the fundamentals of the modern web app: databases.
Andy Aymeloglu was Director of Engineering at Palantir Technologies from 2005 to 2015, growing it from a fledgling company to an 1800-person company with offices across the globe. He has since served as VP of Engineering at Hexagon Bio, Alcor member, and Founding Partner at Commit Capital, while advising startups in the Bay Area.
This lecture was recorded at UATX on April 9, 2026.
00:00 — Introduction
00:50 — Five problems
01:50 — How databases solve these problems
03:28 — Can you read the entire file into memory?
05:04 — How to find the page you want
08:07 — A B-tree, pictured
08:57 — How does the database know what tables exist?
10:25 — Protecting yourself from data corruption
10:56 — Solving the race condition
13:38 — Five problems and their solutions
14:48 — How the SQLite master table works
18:41 — Who are Alice and Bob?
20:02 — How to extract data from the database
22:53 — Declarative vs imperative languages
25:06 — Connecting to SQLite from Python
26:36 — How to create tables
28:04 — How to insert data
29:27 — How to query data
30:44 — Filtering, ordering, and counting
33:08 — A practical exercise: how to find all the messages sent by Alice
37:21 — Why question marks matter
42:03 — How to decide how your tables should look
45:23 — Summarizing the three options
52:39 — When to use which table
53:30 — How to build the chat data layer
55:12 — What comes next
The Modern Web App | TRAILER
UATX Freshman Book Awards
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Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman
Numerical Methods for Engineers, Steven C. Chapra
Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, Richard Feynman
Atoms in the Family, Laura Fermi
To Engineer Is Human, Henry Petroski
The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
Dean Staley with freshman Will McCollom.
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After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre
Against the Protestant Gnostics, Philip J. Lee
The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, Eric Voegelin
The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor
Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads, Dominic O’Meara
Neoplatonism, Pauliina Remes
A Secular Age, Charles Taylor
Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge, Thomas Pfau
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The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama
The Speeches & Writings of Abraham Lincoln: A Library of America Boxed Set
1776, David McCullough
Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
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Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville
Boston: A Revolutionary History, Brian Deming
Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, John Carlin
Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes
Manliness, Harvey Mansfield
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The Hebrew Bible, translation by Robert Alter, with commentary
Complete Works, Plato
What Are We Doing Here? Essays, Marilynne Robinson
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