Justin Abrahms

I just quoted a movie to someone. They hadn't seen it. I sent them a link, and realized the movie is 25 years old. It was Zoolander (2001). 👴

Justin Abrahms reposted

Aaron HM

@aaronhm.bsky.social

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

I made a cool thing. My wife and I are learning German. I made a thing where I can share photos or text snippets of German I see in the wild. Computer will OCR it, compare to our anki accounts.. then make new cards to learn from our seen stuff. Pretty rad!

If you didn’t know, these are “grape bones”.

My kid: “I’ve been so busy skipping, I had forgotten how to frolic.” What a blessed life.

tools.justin.abrah.msWindow-based SLOs

11 Sept

I made a little tools domain like @simonwillison.net does to host little AI-generated teaching resources. This one was me trying to explain how window-oriented SLOs worked and how they combined in potentially unintuitive ways. Thanks for the idea, Simon! tools.justin.abrah.ms/sli-slos/

5 Sept

Berlin has an actual fall time where the air gets crisp and I LOVE it. 😍 🍂

1 Sept

I hate european pizza and I just want a neighborhood slice. 😭😭😭

justin.abrah.msA skill for single-player agentic knowledge managementA CLI and a set of Claude hooks that let agents file small facts mid-session, queue them for my review, and read them back when the next session starts.

26 Aug

I wrote up the knowledge skill I've been playing with for a few months. It's a facts cli with a few hooks for agents to query and write to.. plus a way to review the facts the agents discover. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-08...

justin.abrah.msJustin AbrahmsPrincipal Engineer and Technical Leader. Transforming engineering organizations through platform excellence.

23 Aug

Did a little update to my website to center around the through-line in my ~20 year career: increasing the productive capacity of software engineers. justin.abrah.ms justin.abrah.ms/blog/

21 Aug

Looking up from two years of heavy LLM use. It’s allowed me to underinvest where I shouldn’t. Now to think through what’s next..

18 Aug

Playing with a little semi autonomous coding factory to test some things out in the small. I have the robots a public blog and it’s quite the delight. hacklog.sublayer.space if you’d like to follow along.

justin.abrah.msConcept to Cash: Initiative retrospectives and visualizationModeling an initiative as a distributed trace — epics, stories and pull requests as nested spans — to see where the calendar time actually went, plus a ridgeline plot for tracking WIP.

14 Aug

I had occasion to do a deep dive on an initiative to understand where the wait states were & what we might gain if we invested more heavily in AI-assisted development. This describes the resulting tool based on my time at eBay doubling the productivity of engineers. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-08...

justin.abrah.msA framework for cataloguing technical debtA simple framework for scoring technical debt so you know what to do now versus later

30 July

When it's time to pay down tech debt.. how do you pick what's up first? At my last gig, we scored it: (blast_radius × frequency) + (velocity × trend), each 1–5. 31+ means drop everything, <10 means just watch it. Framework + worked examples: justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-07...

20 July

Working for an open source company is such an unlock. Interview candidate just linked me their public docs that they wrote for their thing. 🙌

17 July

www.mixfont.com/experiments/... - how fantastic up close vs further away.

12 July

For the Berlin-local people @localfirstconf.com .. where do y'all hang out in Berlin? I'm unfortunately not there, but would love to generally hang out with local-oriented tech folks.

github.comGitHub - justinabrahms/ncr: Read a pull request outside-in, following call paths — not alphabetical-by-filename.Read a pull request outside-in, following call paths — not alphabetical-by-filename. - justinabrahms/ncr

4 July

Earlier today I sat down and wondered what it would look like to have an LLM reorder a code review for comprehension. This was the result. I’d love to hear your take. ncr, narrative code review. github.com/justinabrahm...

justinabrahms.github.ioncr — read a PR as a storyncr turns a pull request into an outside-in narrative — call-path chapters instead of alphabetical files. Five real PRs rendered as stories.

5 July

justinabrahms.github.io/ncr/ has actual examples of what it looks like: - datasette (python) - supabase (typescript) - gitea (go) - keycloak (java) - uv (rust)

youtube.comWhat we planned vs. what we shipped: A platform migration story - Justin Abrahms | PlatformCon 2026YouTube video by Platform Engineering

23 June

This is my talk for PlatformCon 2026 about how I wrote a k8s platform at Thrive Market, how it deviated from plan, and how I had feelings about it. Nothing ground breaking, just an in-the-trenches reality report with some reflection www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmb6...

17 June

My experience w German bureaucracy is signing up for an appointment online, being told to be there at 9:37. Show up w a file folder of documents. There’s a sign w my appointment number and the room I should go to. Sign 2 things. Answer a couple of questions. Out by 9:43. America would be so lucky.

10 June

Moving to Berlin, I expected to hear non-English languages in the office. I was not prepared for how little of it would be in German.

3 June

London feels like what a city would look like if the builders could only use alleyways.

2 June

First talk at Leaddev was A+. This is the engineering leadership equivalent of PyCon (in the best possible interpretation of that statement).

2 June

Conference swag idea: board books. Narrow audience, but if your kid imprints on it.. you’re going to read it many dozens of times. Not sure if it will be positive association or “if I have to read this name one more time..” 😅

21 May

I needed to author some simple code yesterday without an LLM. It’s been ~1.5 years probably since I’ve seriously written code by hand. 1. I had an initial spike of fear that maybe I had forgotten (I hadn’t) 2. I didn’t have an editor downloaded/installed (just used vi) 🤔

recipes.abrah.msAll recipes

2 May

Moving to Germany, we've had to change the way we eat. It was hard, so I uploaded the German health guidelines into a claude project and had it plan meals for us. It's been mostly good. These are those recipes (with updates from having tasted them). recipes.abrah.ms

github.comGitHub - justinabrahms/recipe-server: Self-hosted Cooklang recipe viewer with bulk shopping lists and version history.Self-hosted Cooklang recipe viewer with bulk shopping lists and version history. - justinabrahms/recipe-server

2 May

The recipe server is also open source at github.com/justinabrahm...

2 May

Grass and train tracks and dandelions. Solarpunk as fuck and I love it.

1 Apr

German cellphone plan was €10/mo for 20gb of 5g speeds. Bananas.

31 Mar

In Berlin, we walked 2 blocks and passed 4 actually good playgrounds. This is a paradise for kids. Little hard on parents trying to get somewhere. I’ll take it.

24 Mar

Just walked into a U-bahn and the smell gave me strong sense-memories of the NYC subway. Must be the lubricants or leaking fluids or something? 👃😍

14 Mar

Kid (6) just woke me up at 6:30am on a Saturday.. fully awake.. asking for a sister. 🫠

justin.abrah.msScaling at the mediumest company: half-measures save the dayAt medium-sized companies, the low-hanging fruit is just sitting there. How basic profiling and boring fixes got an ecommerce search service to 3x peak traffic before Black Friday.

9 Mar

At medium-sized companies, the scaling wins are almost embarrassingly available. Nobody's picked the low-hanging fruit yet because nobody's had time to look. I wrote about my experience with a Java search service before Black Friday & getting it to 3x peak traffic. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-03...

justin.abrah.msOn MCPs vs CLIsMCPs are useful, but often overused in my opinion. This is how I think of each one.

7 Mar

I prefer CLIs over MCPs almost unanimously due to context management. I wrote about it here: justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-03...

6 Mar

Hello from @eurosky.social! I'll be in Berlin in 16 days and this feels, in many ways, like the start of something beautiful.

3 Mar

The thing I'm most excited about w/ all of these agents running around is the hope that we'll get ergonomic solutions to delegated identity and tight permission scopes for access control.

Wrote up the full story of how we went from 150 flaky tests to 2 at Thrive Market.. and what happened when we deleted them (nothing broke).

The most interesting part: on the backend, flaky test detectors silently quarantined 80% of our e2e suite over a year. Nobody noticed. Defect rate stayed the same. Accidental controlled experiment.

justin.abrah.msCI Theater: we deleted our flaky tests and nothing brokeOne in four deploys failed — not because the code was wrong, but because the pipeline couldn't be trusted. Here's how we fixed it.

I still think most e2e test suites are providing false confidence. If you have thoughts on this, I'd like to hear them. justin.abrah.ms/2026-02-26-c...

New job is going to be on Azure and it feels like I'm swapping from Dewalt to Makita.

justin.abrah.msClaws don't need to be complicatedHow I built a persistent personal AI agent in 2000 lines of Go that uses my Claude subscription instead of API keys, runs sandboxed via nono and talks to me on Telegram; Learnings about what seems to ...

21 Feb

I spent some time last weekend hacking up my own harness. The code isn't relevant, but I hit on a few things which I think are novel. I use kernel-level isolation instead of docker containers and I'm doing direct `claude -p` invocations instead of API based billing. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02...

21 Feb

Reading the reports coming out of EU Open Source Week and I'm very jealous. 👀

19 Feb

I know we often act like it's not a social network.. but who are your favorite people to follow on github? I need more folks in my gitstreams daily digest.

justin.abrah.msHow to diff a book against your mindUsing a personal knowledge base, we can use embeddings to diff a book against your current knowledge to find novelty.

19 Feb

Actually wrote down how it all works. :) justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02...

Justin Abrahms@justin.abrah.ms

I was learning about embeddings and thought: I could combine the embeddings of my knowledge graph vs a book and those might serve as the basis of a "diff" so I could tell what I might learn from reading it... so I wrote that, using my personal notes. This was the result: github.com/justinabrahm...

gist.github.comOReilly_Continuous_Delivery_In_The_Wild-diff.mdGitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

18 Feb

Finger on the pulse. 💓👀