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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 Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 29/04/2026
Codex has first class skills.md support. We use it all the time.
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Reposted by Ben Meier
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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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 08/04/2026
So true
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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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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 22/03/2026
Actively building something internally at the moment for driving SLO definitions with LLM assisted anomaly detection and error budgeting at scale across thousands of k8s-clusters. Chaos engineering also feeds into protecting those SLOs.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 01/03/2026
Thanks for sharing this! Really appealing.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 01/03/2026
I've also seen this behaviour eliminate valuable onboarding tasks for new starters, so they are left with high risk/high complexity options only.
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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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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 14/02/2026
And having 0 incidents, thus makes you worse at responding to incidents.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 12/02/2026
And they're definitely not on call for it when it breaks.. wheres the feedback loop?
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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 · 05/12/2025
+1 this is more about resilience than robustness
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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 · 16/11/2025
I've been using a Cotopaxi Allpa 28L Travel Pack, and it's been great for 2-4 night trips 👌
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 16/11/2025
This is great. Hot desking at a friends place would be far better than a strange office for hire. Body doubling works.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 28/10/2025
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.
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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
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
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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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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 05/09/2025
Fair enough, just musing, I see your point that any subscription or hook like that would be a bad thing
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 05/09/2025
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.
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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 · 18/08/2025
We used to have the craziest make file + jsonnet scripts to compile final dashboard json from individual components, so cursed.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 16/08/2025
I found the recent one for Linear pretty good, only mentions "AI" once, and explains specifically what its going to do.
Image of linear.app product intelligence announcement
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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 · 25/07/2025
That's great 😅 loving the trex-in-spacesuit pose
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 14/07/2025
Apply grip tape to the seat as well for maximum speed.
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 07/07/2025
Oh wow, blast from the past
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Ben Meier @ben.bsky.meierhost.com · 04/07/2025
😎 Very nice. Are you a "measure and design carefully and print once" or a "iterate fast and print many" kind of person?
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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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