Good point about the importance of checking your own page with your ad blockers and similar turned off.
It's something I imagine a lot of people would forget - I don't think the thought ever occurred to me for a personal site.
Part of having browsed the web with ad blockers turned on for so long is I tend to forget ads exist for the most part - I definitely forget how pervasive they are.
I love the "this guy" piece... Meanwhile he's been the most public person in academia talking about databases over at least the last 5 years, maybe the last 10. He's not only done an awesome job of talking about foundational pieces of databases, but also examining new databases that have come up over the last 10 years or so. He's course is quite open as well, so it's not just the student base that gets to take advantage - https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2023/
The shirts he's generally helped promote and publicize those companies so he has things to hand out to his students, TAs, graduate students.
Back in grad school he got put on probation a second time after hiring a magician off craigslist for admitted students day. The magician showed up drunk and lost his dove in the building.
I am biased since I worked at KineticaDB, but the KineticaDB t-shirts were the best swag I've ever received. I have a closet full of them, 3x/yr across the three years I was there. I wore some socially and fashionably, and others at the gym. They used high-end fabrics comfortable for day and night.
I think about ROI on marketing and this must be incredible w/r/t Employee alignment. Imagine having employees wear your brand day in day out!
how small is your closest? i've heard how small apartments can be in places like NYC/SF, but if the space provided for your clothes is filled by 9 t-shirts, i'm going to need to re-evaluate small again.
The 50/50 shirts are great. I've got a stripe shirt that first turned me on to them and I went online and bought a bunch of blank ones in different colors.
My current company found a similar shirt from bella+canvas that is also great. It and the stripe shirt are the only vendor shirts in my regular rotation.
You're right. I misread " went online and bought a bunch of blank ones in different colors." by completely reading past "blank ones" and thought they went to get different colors of the branded shirt.
reading comprehension was always a skill set lost on me
I will toss out a second vote for bella+canvas being a modern equivalent to the american apparel of yesteryear.
What is very frustrating is I have 2XL shirts from 2007-2009 that fit better than a 4XL from 2022. I've tried to narrow it down to brands and blends and the 50/50 or tri-blend shirts have held their true sizes for longer but somewhere along the way every brand has seemed to have gotten smaller by full inches. In underarmor polos I now buy their tactical line to get the equivalent of their "loose" fit from yesteryear. It is so frustrating and sometimes a huge money waste buying shirts.
The longest lasting shirts in my closet are some Hurley and Billabong shirts from Hot Topic and similar from 2010 or earlier.
For any conference organizers or swag buyers reading this, please start offering up to 4XL in any cheap brand shirts, especially 100% cotton, even if it is preshrunk.
It was so cool to see Mike Stonebraker's face on a t-shirt!
Back in grad school, I was lucky enough to be on a research group that he helped lead. He was totally unpretentious, and at the time I had no idea what a big deal he was in the database world.
For some reason the Google Fiber T-shirt that Google gave out in Atlanta is almost indestructible. I've worn mine routinely for years, and still see other people wearing them sometimes. Not sure exactly what the secret was, but boy would I love to know!
I think my wife finally tossed all my old thinkgeek shirts. I had a huge collection from my college years including "There are only 10 types of people in this world...", "man love" and "there's not place like 127.0.0.1".
Who has filled this void? I know xkcd had/has some geeky shirts and they shut down too.
Hmm, I too miss the good ol' days, though I have more old tattered Threadless shirts than ThinkGeek. I suppose something like shirt.woot.com might be where the (nerdy) kids today look?
I disagree with nearly this entire post, which is fun. I find that the poly blend shirts that the author loves (especially like the MongoDB shirt) are clingy and sweaty. Softness is low on my list of shirt priorities - comfort and fit are high. I don't know how you could see "mongoDB" and not think it is tech, but maybe I'm too mired in tech to have an outsider's perspective. Also, that dark heathered grey color is everywhere in tech shirts right now and it just screams tech. The only one of these with a good design is the Altibase shirt, but it suffers from having the ugliest color.
Give me black, 100% cotton, heavyweight Hanes Beefy-Ts with retro-looking logos.
Somewhat off-topic but for those who want a black, 100% cotton and lighterweight t-shirt, IMHO nothing compares to Intimissimi[0]
They run a bit small so I recommend one size larger than your regular size. They're currently on sale from Black Friday so only $14.30 each. (Large Black is now out-of-stock, sorry!)
They also make many other varieties like v necks, long sleeve, modal/cashmere/ etc.
(Claimer: I'm not affiliated or getting a referral from this... I just think they're a lesser known brand in the US)
Also worth noting that the only review on the website is very accurate despite being a 1-star review: "The quality of material is great. Neck is too low. Too lenghty".
These are exactly the reasons why I like this shirt. Great material, neck is not too tight, probably an inch longer than many other fitted t-shirts, so your underwear isn't showing all the time.
This whole comment thread is teaching me that apparently there isn't /any/ objective truth when it comes to t shirt comfort.
Before today I figured that was an objective fact that the cheap Hanes ones were unloved -- neck always stretched out, too short and stout.
I'm a fan of LA apparel (aka american apparel) as well as some bella+canvas ones. That stretched out neck just gives me flashbacks to middle school, ugh.
FWIW I don't think Intimissimi shirts have a quote-unquote "stretched out neck", just a tiny bit of extra room... I hadn't even noticed it until I read the review
It's just a weird fleshy body part that I'm not used to seeing and generally don't want to see on other people. Also the feeling of a plasticky "technical" shirt on my own nipples is very unpleasant.
>I don't know how you could see "mongoDB" and not think it is tech
Depends on the age. MongoDB may not have been such a common name back when the tshirt came out. I have a couple of Palantir t-shirts (american apparel, 100% cotton I think) that have held up over a decade and are really comfortable. One of them says, "Save the shire" and Palantir. I don't think people would have known that it's a tech tshirt back then.
Everything about that organization offends me. They took their name from a series of books they apparently never read.
How is Palantir supposed to save the shire? By trampling the rights of the Hobbits in addition to destroying their environment?
The Palantir show a narrow view of events and lead to their users to ruin. It’s like they read the cautionary tale as an instruction manual.
They chose an accurate name for what their product does, but I can’t understand how a person with that clarity of thought would decide to actually make one.
Palantir is a Quenya word meaning far-seeing. The last successful king of Numenor was Tar-Palantir for example.
The palantiri were corrupted by Sauron and limited to only show things that he wanted you to see. This was extremely well known inside Palantir and was deliberately talked about as something we should all consider the risk of.
The origin story of Palantir was the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks not being caught. The goal was to prevent the total eradication of civil liberties that would necessarily follow another successful attack of that magnitude.
Palantir’s software was rejected by organizations performing dragnet style mass data collection.
This is the most pointless hn comment I’ll ever leave, but you shouldn’t assume other people are ignorant or acting out of malice.
Also the tshirts were comfy as fuck and extremely well designed.
To be fair, it's not really a hoodie either as I feel that implies it's a sweater or has the thickness of one. It really is just a long sleeve shirt with a hood attached.
The same distinction between a long sleeve t-shirt and a crewneck sweater. I don't know how they're made, but my layman distinction would be "thickness".
The distinction being a hoddie is a sweatshirt with a hood. As opposed to a long sleeve shirt with a hood. Sweatshirts are thicker. Calling it a hoodie would be like calling a long sleeve shirt a swetashirt because they have the same silhouette.
I strongly disagree with the claim that it's a hoodie simply because it has a hood. Many hooded garments are not hoodies. To be a hoodie, it must be made out of thicker sweatshirt material.
A long-sleeve T-shirt with a hood is just a long-sleeve T-shirt with a hood.
I wear poly ones that are spf50 all the time when I’m fishing so I don’t need to worry about applying sunscreen to large parts of my body multiple times a day.
I typically have really short hair, so I wear one with the hood on when it's chilly inside, but not so chilly that I want the heater on or want to wear a sweater.
My whole climbing crew has made the switch from hats and sunscreen to sunshirts. They fit under a helmet, and they feel less cancery than repeatedly slathering on some goo and crossing your fingers. It's one thing if you're free to roam about to a more comfortable area, but if you're stuck on belay duty on the sunny part of the face, you'll be happier with a sunshirt.
And then you're used to it, and you start wearing them elsewhere too, because why bother with lesser protection?
They may be more popular at higher altitudes than at the beach though. Beach folk have a bit more atmosphere protecting them.
> don't know how you could see "mongoDB" and not think it is tech
I disagree with the author in that I would be comfortable wearing a mongodb shirt in public. Mongoloid is a slur, and at least in Norway it's often shortened to "mongo".
Is that a racial slur (i.e., Asian), or about Down syndrome? The latter was used in the UK many years ago, I've not heard it for 25 years (?), so "mongo" wouldn't raise an eyebrow here now.
It's kinda both. Mongoloid here used to refer to people with Downs, by comparing them to the (non existent) Asian race of Mongoloids due to both often having eyes with epicanthic fold. Of course I didn't know this when using it as a kid back in the days, and I've luckily not heard it used for ages, but I think all of my peers would remember it if used on a t-shirt.
> I don't know how you could see "mongoDB" and not think it is tech
Idk but mongo-anything has clearly insulting connotations hasn't it? I'm not a fan of cancelling language at all but still find it very surprising a product with that name could advance that far in enterprise computing. I guess I had hoped the article would explain the joke I was missing here.
According to the founders "mongo" came from "humongous" not "mongoloid". Additionally, "Mongo" has never had insulting conotations in America, as far as I know. Also, if you weren't aware, Mongo is an ethnicity and a language, should we force them to change the name?
Generally: started out as undershirts, became work shirts (especially in the USN during WW2), and then folks just started wearing them on a daily basis post-war, mostly in 'misfit' / counter-culture groups in the 1950s (especially amongst teenagers), and the hippy culture embracing them in the 1960s.
Like the author, my favorite t-shirt of all time is an early 2010's American Apparel blend shirt, (though mine is a Stripe CTF3 winner shirt.) However, American Apparel changed something mid decade, and I've never been able to get anything close to as comfortable as those shirts.
My current standard shirt are the NextLevel tri-blends, which are almost as good, and can be ordered plain online, or you can find them with all the logos you want in thrift store near techie areas.
I'm in the print space and this post is weird. I have that exact same green MongoDB on the AA 50/50, as well as a couple other MongoDB shirts printed on different blanks. Somebody picked the design, picked a blank, and printed a batch. Next week somebody else will pick a different blank, maybe even for the same design.
+1 for how great the Snowflake t-shirt is (ranked #3). I wore it a lot during the COVID era, and the poly blend is still soft and has withstood a lot of washing and drying.
When we signed onto Snowflake in 2019, a week later a surprise HUGE box of swag arrived, with a dozen shirts and lots of other things. Our team and corner of the office became The Place To Be for a while.
I've gotten a couple PostgreSQL t-shirts over the years when I volunteered for this or that.
My favorite one is the one for the release of PostgreSQL 8.4. It's simply blue on white and the design is after one of the boxes from the periodic table of the elements: with "Pg" in the middle and (as I recall, it's not in front of me now) and an "atomic weight" of 8.4.
The other was for the release of PostgreSQL 9.0 when replication was introduced. It's a blue shirt with white print. That banner feature is the prominent text on the front and a herd of Elephants charging at the viewer like you might see a stampede of horses do on a western movie's poster.
Good designs celebrating milestone events for the project.
This repo, and the other forks of its original which have even more "misbrands", are going to have me ordering some custom sticker sheets here shortly, thanks for sharing!
The AWS/Azure and Java/JavaScript ones are good, but the Vim/VS Code one is gold.
If anyone would like a free PostgresML T-shirt, we just did our first run. Feel free to email me with your shipping info and size. It'd also be nice to get to know you a bit if your email address isn't obvious.
Tableau used to give employees t-shirts multiple times a year (I had at least 15 by the time I left). I had a favorite I'm now reminded used "Next Level" shirts. Time to go buy a bunch of their blank t-shirts.
135 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadit looks like blog about how he likes his t-shirts
I can't see any ads - although my firefox extentions will be blocking them if there was any
I think it's likely that the OP uses an adblocker too and never even saw the ads on his own site.
It's something I imagine a lot of people would forget - I don't think the thought ever occurred to me for a personal site.
Part of having browsed the web with ad blockers turned on for so long is I tend to forget ads exist for the most part - I definitely forget how pervasive they are.
The shirts he's generally helped promote and publicize those companies so he has things to hand out to his students, TAs, graduate students.
These are not ads directly added by "this guy", but rather by his choice of using Disqus for adding comments to the site.
For extra evil Discus should really pop up an ad blocker blocker.
I think about ROI on marketing and this must be incredible w/r/t Employee alignment. Imagine having employees wear your brand day in day out!
how small is your closest? i've heard how small apartments can be in places like NYC/SF, but if the space provided for your clothes is filled by 9 t-shirts, i'm going to need to re-evaluate small again.
The 3x * 3 was meant to convey the variety (we did unique prints each IRL meeting)
My current company found a similar shirt from bella+canvas that is also great. It and the stripe shirt are the only vendor shirts in my regular rotation.
Edit: Ignore this. Reading comprehension clearly needs work
reading comprehension was always a skill set lost on me
What is very frustrating is I have 2XL shirts from 2007-2009 that fit better than a 4XL from 2022. I've tried to narrow it down to brands and blends and the 50/50 or tri-blend shirts have held their true sizes for longer but somewhere along the way every brand has seemed to have gotten smaller by full inches. In underarmor polos I now buy their tactical line to get the equivalent of their "loose" fit from yesteryear. It is so frustrating and sometimes a huge money waste buying shirts.
The longest lasting shirts in my closet are some Hurley and Billabong shirts from Hot Topic and similar from 2010 or earlier.
For any conference organizers or swag buyers reading this, please start offering up to 4XL in any cheap brand shirts, especially 100% cotton, even if it is preshrunk.
My current company has been using bella+canvas of late, and I wear them all_the_time, they are so comfortable that I worry about their durability.
I'm also super, super big into the collars not stretching out. I can't stand that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Back in grad school, I was lucky enough to be on a research group that he helped lead. He was totally unpretentious, and at the time I had no idea what a big deal he was in the database world.
I walked by the office a few weeks ago. It’s vacant and looked trashed inside. There’s a metaphor there.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/lol-code-geek-select-from-user...
(This shows the shirt you could buy once-upon-a-time from thinkgeek, which appears to be no more...)
I believe they used beefy-t brand shirts, which was like the nicest thing you could get for t-shirts at the time. (Personal opinion, don't @ me.)
Who has filled this void? I know xkcd had/has some geeky shirts and they shut down too.
Give me black, 100% cotton, heavyweight Hanes Beefy-Ts with retro-looking logos.
They run a bit small so I recommend one size larger than your regular size. They're currently on sale from Black Friday so only $14.30 each. (Large Black is now out-of-stock, sorry!)
They also make many other varieties like v necks, long sleeve, modal/cashmere/ etc.
(Claimer: I'm not affiliated or getting a referral from this... I just think they're a lesser known brand in the US)
__________
0. https://www.intimissimi.com/us/product/short_sleeve_crew_nec...
These are exactly the reasons why I like this shirt. Great material, neck is not too tight, probably an inch longer than many other fitted t-shirts, so your underwear isn't showing all the time.
This whole comment thread is teaching me that apparently there isn't /any/ objective truth when it comes to t shirt comfort.
Before today I figured that was an objective fact that the cheap Hanes ones were unloved -- neck always stretched out, too short and stout.
I'm a fan of LA apparel (aka american apparel) as well as some bella+canvas ones. That stretched out neck just gives me flashbacks to middle school, ugh.
That's true of many things and has been for a long time. "De gustibus non disputandum est," as the Romans said. "It's useless to argue about taste."
I updated your statement for the remainder of modern history. ^_^
Depends on the age. MongoDB may not have been such a common name back when the tshirt came out. I have a couple of Palantir t-shirts (american apparel, 100% cotton I think) that have held up over a decade and are really comfortable. One of them says, "Save the shire" and Palantir. I don't think people would have known that it's a tech tshirt back then.
How is Palantir supposed to save the shire? By trampling the rights of the Hobbits in addition to destroying their environment?
The Palantir show a narrow view of events and lead to their users to ruin. It’s like they read the cautionary tale as an instruction manual.
They chose an accurate name for what their product does, but I can’t understand how a person with that clarity of thought would decide to actually make one.
The palantiri were corrupted by Sauron and limited to only show things that he wanted you to see. This was extremely well known inside Palantir and was deliberately talked about as something we should all consider the risk of.
The origin story of Palantir was the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks not being caught. The goal was to prevent the total eradication of civil liberties that would necessarily follow another successful attack of that magnitude.
Palantir’s software was rejected by organizations performing dragnet style mass data collection.
This is the most pointless hn comment I’ll ever leave, but you shouldn’t assume other people are ignorant or acting out of malice.
Also the tshirts were comfy as fuck and extremely well designed.
A long-sleeve T-shirt with a hood is just a long-sleeve T-shirt with a hood.
I can't imagine when I'd wear one either - if I want protection from the sun I'll wear a hat or sunscreen - not a hood.
And then you're used to it, and you start wearing them elsewhere too, because why bother with lesser protection?
They may be more popular at higher altitudes than at the beach though. Beach folk have a bit more atmosphere protecting them.
But they changed the fabric a while ago and it's not the same.
Still have a few that are getting pretty threadbare.
Watch out because some Hanes Premium are 100% cotton, which is not what you want at least at this price point.
I disagree with the author in that I would be comfortable wearing a mongodb shirt in public. Mongoloid is a slur, and at least in Norway it's often shortened to "mongo".
AFAICT it's not exactly used against people with actual Down syndrome, but rather as a synonym for "idiot" and the like.
Idk but mongo-anything has clearly insulting connotations hasn't it? I'm not a fan of cancelling language at all but still find it very surprising a product with that name could advance that far in enterprise computing. I guess I had hoped the article would explain the joke I was missing here.
Update: ads on a CMU site?
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds_xyrZCSo8
Generally: started out as undershirts, became work shirts (especially in the USN during WW2), and then folks just started wearing them on a daily basis post-war, mostly in 'misfit' / counter-culture groups in the 1950s (especially amongst teenagers), and the hippy culture embracing them in the 1960s.
My current standard shirt are the NextLevel tri-blends, which are almost as good, and can be ordered plain online, or you can find them with all the logos you want in thrift store near techie areas.
* https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/1659019035818729472
* https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/1335045678876270592
* https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/1125465168023048193
* https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/996191088372322304
* https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/862320227601850368
My highlights from the last 6-7 years:
* DuckDB (European embroidery!)
* Materialize (like Snowflake)
* Yellowbrick (wild designs)
* Timescale (old logo was popular)
-- Andy
When we signed onto Snowflake in 2019, a week later a surprise HUGE box of swag arrived, with a dozen shirts and lots of other things. Our team and corner of the office became The Place To Be for a while.
My favorite one is the one for the release of PostgreSQL 8.4. It's simply blue on white and the design is after one of the boxes from the periodic table of the elements: with "Pg" in the middle and (as I recall, it's not in front of me now) and an "atomic weight" of 8.4.
The other was for the release of PostgreSQL 9.0 when replication was introduced. It's a blue shirt with white print. That banner feature is the prominent text on the front and a herd of Elephants charging at the viewer like you might see a stampede of horses do on a western movie's poster.
Good designs celebrating milestone events for the project.
https://github.com/jogerj/misbrands/blob/master/azure.svg
https://github.com/jogerj/misbrands/blob/master/aws.svg
This is the exact kind of dumb shirt I’m looking for
I originally tried SpreadShirt, but they rejected the design due to copyright.
The AWS/Azure and Java/JavaScript ones are good, but the Vim/VS Code one is gold.
I'm a database geek and would happily rep your stuff!