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Ben Meier

@ben.bsky.meierhost.com
315 followers 627 following 171 posts

Principal Software Engineer - distributed systems, go, rust; he/him; Dad; Bristol 🇬🇧, 🇿🇦; Currently enterprise engineering; previously Platform Engineer, VMM, and FaaS data planes. Blog: bensblog.meierhost.com

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Reposted by Ben Meier
Siobhán @shibbi.me · 24/07/2026
AI is an apocalyptic technology. “Apocalypse” doesn’t mean “end of the world”. It means “revelation” or “disclosure”. AI will expose every crack in our society that we have heretofore more-or-less successfully papered over. Nothing will be able to stay as it was. (And that’s (bad | good).)
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Ben Werdmuller @werd.io · 25/04/2026
One of the most important pieces of AI commentary: "software brain" is important to understand if we want to get through this era with our humanity intact. werd.io/the-world-is...
werd.io
The world is not a database
One of the most important pieces of AI commentary: "software brain" is important to understand if we want to get through this era with our humanity intact.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Ben Schorr @bschorr.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Good planning requires more than just a spreadsheet.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 18/02/2026
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!)
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.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Filippo Valsorda @filippo.abyssdomain.expert · 20/02/2026
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!
words.filippo.io
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.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Joe Hellerstein @joehellerstein.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
📄 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...
jhellerstein.github.io
Coding Agents Meet Distributed Reality
AI is about to write most of the code in the world. Most of the code in the world participates in a distributed system. And distributed code is where our worst…
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 05/01/2026
Hahaha "All encryption is end-to-end, if you’re not picky about the ends."
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 19/12/2025
Ooo the new gig laptop is a custom 48GB 14" M4 Pro which is pretty nice 😎
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 19/12/2025
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.
joanwestenberg.com
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'...
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 28/11/2025
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.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 28/11/2025
Excited for what the new year will bring: a new role!
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Reposted by Ben Meier
P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 25/11/2025
If everything is a top priority, then everything gets done quickly. That's basic management
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 19/10/2025
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.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 04/10/2025
Copilot go brrrrrrr
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 07/09/2025
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 🤞
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 05/09/2025
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.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 05/09/2025
The days' mission, platform engineering example for a Score → AWS lambda and Valkey setup.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 31/08/2025
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...
axios.com
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.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Luke Hinds @lukehinds.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
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"
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 16/08/2025
Stumbled upon a signed copy of @benaaronovitch.bsky.social 's Stone and Sky in Bristol today, good start to the PTO week 👍
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 11/08/2025
Grated my finger instead of the cheese today. Nice one.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 10/08/2025
Why do payment processors have such obscure URLs for 3d secure or credit card info. Like, why do I want to put my details into `live.opacy.eu.elavon.com/....` o.o
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Jeremy Morrell @jeremymorrell.dev · 10/08/2025
This is very good from @werd.io werd.io/evaluating-ai/
werd.io
Evaluating AI
How to think about vendors, technology, and power
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 09/08/2025
Build stuff you're proud of.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 08/08/2025
LLMs are rapidly normalizing us to just overlook trivial errors and mistakes. And that's treated as a feature.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 05/08/2025
I've spent the last week and a bit designing and building an authn+authz stack from scratch with users, oauth, developer tokens, memberships, and invites. Something that's been done thousands of times before but is still fun and fulfilling to implement again.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 01/08/2025
Basically impossible to get anything done in Europe between mid-July and September.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 30/07/2025
Implemented user sign up with google oauth, login, logout, and session token based authentication today, and it's a nice comprehensive story to test and demo together. Nice to do it with minimal dependencies too.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 30/06/2025
The little air conditioner that could.
Graph showing temperature of nursery ramping up to 25C during the day until air conditioner kicks in at 5 and pulls it back down to 23C.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 28/06/2025
DEDUPLICATE (your rabbitmq messages)
media.tenor.com
a dalek from doctor who is standing in a dark room and says `` externi '' .
Alt: a dalek from doctor who is standing in a dark room and saying exterminate
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 24/06/2025
This train trip would be much more productive if I had the AI agents running in a remote machine rather than on the laptop where the internet connection keeps dropping due to tunnels, trees, fields, stray sheep, etc. 🤔
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 20/06/2025
Nightmare trying to get the baby to sleep in these temperatures 😣
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 04/06/2025
I know JIRA rants are a bit of a flogged horse by now.. But really. How can such a complex product be so bad at satisfying day-to-day kanban development and prioritisation.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Khalil @onu.uno · 02/06/2025
I don’t know who did this awesome clip but yeah, scary stuff … #AI #ArtificialIntelligence
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 01/06/2025
Sweet sweet 150kW charging.. And oh god my wallet.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Richard Smyth @rsmythfreelance.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
Why are they reporting it like it's a paramilitary coup?
BBC headline: Group backed by Judi Dench takes over North Yorkshire nature site.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 27/05/2025
The umbrella distribution protocol. Whereby rain protection devices distribute themselves evenly throughout the corners of high street shops when humidity is high.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 26/05/2025
😠 The two required questions after any llm answer.... "are you sure?" and then "great, are you sure now?" Mad how many times the answer just flips around.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 20/05/2025
Oh boy!
Image of a new 8tb western digital purple 3.5" drive.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 19/05/2025
Urgh, LLMs get so distracted summarizing documents or working with text that contains html-like blocks `<thing>` even if not used in that way at all in context. The models are so tuned to consider these blocks as informative that they end up dropping them from output summaries.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 17/05/2025
Does the baby's nursery need about 4 temperature, 3 humidity, and 2 co2 sensors of various kinds? No, but that's where we are for some reason.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 07/05/2025
Never underestimate the skill of a local neighborhood seamstress at extending the life of old worn clothes. Resisting the urge to buy new.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 25/04/2025
`ON DELETE RESTRICT INITIALLY DEFERRED` — love the small of data integrity in the morning…
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 19/04/2025
Meta AI logo hovering front and center in WhatsApp.. smh.. No way to disable or hide it.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Wondermark Comics @wondermark.com · 21/05/2024
"You think AS I was building this, I should have been setting up CAMERAS?" // Wondermark #1548; Spring Forth, My Creation
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 06/04/2025
April
Tree in blossom against a blue sky
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 03/04/2025
Cable car to #kubecon. It's CNCF #Score today
Picture from London IFS cable car towards Excel center
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 02/04/2025
There are too few stickers on my laptop so I'm heading to London for a sticker convention. Oh and talking CNCF Score and platform engineering. See you there #kubecon!
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Reposted by Ben Meier
Jen Gentleman @jenmsft.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
Ouch
Screenshot of a tweet by someone named Alli. It says "babe are you ok? it's q2 and you've barely touched your "q1 roadmap"
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 01/04/2025
After working on a bunch of MCP and LLM client tooling recently, I am firmly in the camp of "prompt engineering is not engineering". It is _hoping_ for the best based on flimsy reasoning.
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