Ben Meier

Thanks for sharing this! Really appealing.

I've also seen this behaviour eliminate valuable onboarding tasks for new starters, so they are left with high risk/high complexity options only.

Book cover of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition". It has a similar wild boar on the cover as the first edition, but it uses O'Reilly's new cover design, and the boar is now slightly colourised.

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅

(BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

Turn Dependabot Off I recommend turning Dependabot off and replacing it with a pair of scheduled GitHub Actions, one running govulncheck, and the other running CI against the latest version of your dependencies.

Dependabot security alerts have terrible signal-to-noise ratio, especially for Go vulns. That hurts security!

Just turn it off and set up a pair of scheduled GitHub Actions, one running govulncheck and the other running CI with the latest version of your deps.

Less work, less risk, better results!

And having 0 incidents, thus makes you worse at responding to incidents.

And they're definitely not on call for it when it breaks.. wheres the feedback loop?

📄 New blog post!

AI will soon write most distributed code.
Distributed code is where our worst bugs —Heisenbugs— live.

The real lever isn’t “test more,” it’s **aim better**: AI should target frameworks where correctness contracts are explicit and checkable.

jhellerstein.github.io/blog/codegen...

Hahaha "All encryption is end-to-end, if you’re not picky about the ends."

Ooo the new gig laptop is a custom 48GB 14" M4 Pro which is pretty nice 😎

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.  We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.  We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies. We're hungry and we don'...

Quite enjoyed this post www.joanwestenberg.com/thin-desires...

> The person who bakes bread isn't trying to fix the world. They're not making any attempt to either dent or undent the universe.
> They're trying to spend a Sunday afternoon in a way that doesn't leave them feeling emptied out.

+1 this is more about resilience than robustness

These last few weeks have been the first time really contributing to a React code base for more than just a few adjustments. And I'm getting it now. I can also see how much discipline you need to keep things tidy. I'd still try and use HTMX first so I can lean more on my backend experience.

Excited for what the new year will bring: a new role!

If everything is a top priority, then everything gets done quickly. That's basic management

I've been using a Cotopaxi Allpa 28L Travel Pack, and it's been great for 2-4 night trips 👌

This is great. Hot desking at a friends place would be far better than a strange office for hire. Body doubling works.

And many folks assume that when a cloud region/AZ is "down" it's a binary condition. Instead of the strange brown-out, half up half down state that usually emerges in reality.

Wonderful weekend mornings. The bad: toddler wants to wake up and play at 4 am. The good: they fall back asleep by 6 and everyone including the dog can have a lie in.

Yup, Score is an abstract container app specification that can be deployed on multiple runtimes like docker compose, k8s, ECS, Lambda, etc. And provides a spec for resolving resource dependencies

Copilot go brrrrrrr

Ooh, that frame.work desktop is very neat. Hopefully next time I've got time and a need for a desktop it'll still be an option 🤞

Managing VPCs and subnets and routing tables feels so old school and cloud 1.0. I wish the industry had moved on further from this by now.

The days' mission, platform engineering example for a Score → AWS lambda and Valkey setup.

Fair enough, just musing, I see your point that any subscription or hook like that would be a bad thing

Maybe one could do a subscription model, and ship the new imaged appliance with updates along with a return envelope to ship back the old one, just swap over some persistent storage/USB stick. Something you can't exactly do with a 1U/server/expensive bit of kit.

AI is already taking jobs away from entry-level workers Software and customer service are most at risk right now and could be the canary in the coal mine.

Remember, kids: A real big goal of "AI" is to entirely sever capital from labor, and no, there will be no universal basic income, you can all just starve and die, thanks

www.axios.com/2025/08/26/a...

Manager: "What's this milestone about ..'Living on a prayer'?"

Lead: "That's the documentation deliverable"

Manager: "What's the status of that?"

Lead: "We're halfway there"

Manager: "Why is progress so slow?"

Lead: "You fired Tommy"

Manager: "So?"

Lead: "Tommy used to work on the docs"

We used to have the craziest make file + jsonnet scripts to compile final dashboard json from individual components, so cursed.

Image of linear.app product intelligence announcement

I found the recent one for Linear pretty good, only mentions "AI" once, and explains specifically what its going to do.

Stumbled upon a signed copy of @benaaronovitch.bsky.social 's Stone and Sky in Bristol today, good start to the PTO week 👍