Tom Elliott

After Thursday's GitHub incident, I got thinking about SLOs. Most reliability discussion is limited to uptime and latency, but there are so many more things to pay attention to. I wrote a post about correctness SLOs and why their bar is 7 nines or more! telliott.me/posts/pipeli...

This GitHub incident is insane. Merge queue commits have been reverting previously merged commits at random. This not only breaks the mental contract teams have with Git in general, but is subtle enough to be completely missed until something breaks. www.githubstatus.com/incidents/zs...

I recently hit the two month mark at @modal-labs.bsky.social and I’d love you to come join me! Hard to believe it’s just 8 weeks, we’re shipping so often, learning fast, and growing even faster. Plenty of brand-new, empty desks and interesting technical challenges. modal.com/company#care...

Name that tune! Bip a dip a dee. Beep. Bip a dip a dee.

Feel like speaking in terms of memes harms your credibility? Upgrade to using "principles" named after people you've never heard of! Like a transitive Dunning-Kruger effect.

You might have heard of merge queues. You might even have used one at work. If so, you might even hate them. But if you've never used them before, how do you decide if your engineering team would benefit from a merge queue? telliott.me/posts/why-me...

Have you heard the one about the company that makes zippers? IYKYKKYK

A teachable moment for AI

Saw Project Hail Mary last night. A great movie and a mostly faithful adaptation. Except they cut out the scene at the start where he rips out his catheter. Cowards.

Comparing two rate limiting strategies, one that's (almost) pleasant to work with, another that is very much not. telliott.me/posts/how-fr...

Just imported a resource into a Pulumi project for the first time. Pleasantly surprised by how smooth it went. I think I'm now a fan.

Technical interviews have changed a lot over the years. Various kinds of interviews have drawn various kinds of complaint. We can make it better, but it'll still always be a bit broken. telliott.me/posts/tech-i...

There's no escaping it, AI is writing a lot of code. Some great, some needing human intervention. But how should we focus our review efforts to catch the bugs without getting overwhelmed? telliott.me/posts/how-mu...

Wait, was Maria (dear as she was) including him in an activity or setting the beat for the song?

A weekend project to explore GitHub Actions deployments and Pulumi! telliott.me/posts/approv...

Historians have recently uncovered a centuries-old artwork depicting Norman soldiers fighting alligators in a marsh. They call it the Bayou Tapestry.

I've been dissatisfied with SubStack for a little while, and finally got my act together to move to a self-hosted site where I have more control. telliott.me/posts/rehous...

Anyone else think “Commuter Benefit” would be a good name for a band? “Hi, we’re Commuter Benefit and this is our cover of Fast Car”

It's been a bad couple of weeks for GitHub reliability, but how does this compare to their previous performance? I pulled some data from their status page to find out. open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

"Make no mistakes." is a confusing kind of prompt. Confusing in the sense that I can't decide if it's more like: - Giving an intern no coaching and being frustrated they didn't "meet expectations". - "I hereby declare that Facebook cannot use my content for stuff."

Is Plur1bus secretly about AI? Officially, no, but that didn't stop me seeing shadows of GPUs in almost every scene. open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

AI coding tools either feel magical or incredibly frustrating. A recent experience left me feeling very glad I still know how to code. open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

Beyond Palindrome! Two men enter, reten nem owt.

CI/CD has been top of mind for me for at least the last couple of years. Now coding assistants are starting to be adopted widely, I'm wondering how the SDLC might change to keep up. Will we be using centralized CI systems 5 years from now? open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

My Apple Watch told me it was 49 degrees today. Lies. I should have looked at my phone before I went out in 17 degree weather without a hat.

I think the Fallout series just invented a new trope: Gory Discretion Shot Fakeout

Iain M Banks's Culture series totals around 1.4 million words. At 750 words a day, that would take 5 years. They were released over a period of 25. Planning and editing are a lot more work than I thought!

The final part! It's been a month and a half since I started working on a Git-backed REST API. High time to wrap it up and answer the dang question already! open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

With all this generated code, PRs feel like the bottleneck. Then again, thinking back to my teams before AI, they already were! A PR written in 1 day took 3 or more to approve. So we added linters, shifted left, all that good stuff. We need all that more than ever now.

Wait, you’re telling me that that Chinese robot they’ve been showing off is called the T800? Holy Torment Nexus, Batman.

My git-backed REST API is performant and can even handle concurrent requests, but is it production ready? Here's how I went about making it stable. open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

I just learned about NOC the whale. Incredibly creepy until you hear the recording. Then only a bit creepy.

After 18 months working on Ocuroot, it's time to move on. I've had quite a ride but there's no better time than a new year to make changes and try something different. This post goes into why things didn't work out, what I learned, and why it was totally worth it. www.ocuroot.com/blog/winding...

Someone had too much fun

Squirrel footprints on the scaffold! Magical.

This take is a bit outdated now. At its core it is still true, but lots has happened to improve LLMs as fact-retrieval tools, and I think they’re generally very good at it provided you, the operator, have your head screwed on and do the work to verify.

The more I watch The Traitors, the more Alan Cumming sounds like Moira Rose.

If you're a typical Git user, you may not have heard much about Git trees. They're a key part of plumbing, but don't often show up to the end user. So here's my overview. Don't worry, this particular tree won't leave pine needles all over your carpet! open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

Low budget horror movie concept: haunted cootie catcher

Watching “The Holiday” with my wife. We put it on as background but forgot how much we enjoyed it. Now gripped. Cooking can wait.

My bones are so brittle, but I always drink plenty of…

Given chocolate drinks weren’t sweetened until the 16th century, Judy must have spent 800 years making some bitter-ass cocoa.