iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

You can thank my family for forcing me to get my confirmation, because that's how I was able to write this article. chaotictoejam.substack.com/p/thou-shalt...

chaotictoejam.substack.com

Thou Shalt Not Have Sex With Thy Neighbor's Donkey

Or: Why Jensen Huang Should Read Deuteronomy

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Heaps have a way of showing up in interviews disguised as something else. My latest video breaks down the signals that tell you it's actually a heap problem, and the mistakes that trips people up under pressure. youtu.be/QcWbdgAxzzA Code + writeup: chaotictoejam.com/resources/wh...

youtu.be

When to Use a Heap (The Answer Interviewers Want to Hear)

YouTube video by Dr. Joanne Skiles

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

The thing about a bad manager's call: sometimes it doesn't stay in the past. It just waits for the next person who reminds you of it. Finally sat down and wrote about one from a decade ago that still lives with me. open.substack.com/pub/chaotict...

He Wasn't Analytical. He Was Slow.

What My Manager Taught Me by Defending the Wrong Person

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Two rants in a week, y'all are going to have to put me on watch or something… This one is on accountability debt (and spoiler the Meta part I go in more detail on my podcast that drops tomorrow). When we let AI replace our judgement real people are affected. open.substack.com/pub/chaotict...

Who Is Responsible When "AI" Decides to Punish You Unjustly?

The efficiency gets captured upstream. The cost gets paid by whoever the system wasn't built to see.

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Sometimes I have insane inspiration from the tiniest interactions and then write 1500 words... open.substack.com/pub/chaotict...

Pokemon Go Is Everything Wrong With Lazy Programming

A love letter to the worst-engineered app I open every single day

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

The scream test: turn something off in prod and see who screams. It's a real debugging technique. also possibly the most honest audit tool in tech. open.spotify.com/episode/2uTp...

revoke: if the company falls apart, that's their fault

Chaotic Commits | Software, AI, and Uncomfortable Truths · Episode

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Completely agree. Worth the read it's better than learning during an active incident.

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Whenever I have to go into Meta Business I hate every minute of it.

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

I started a Substack, "Chaos, Committed" Cloud architecture, AI in production, and the parts of engineering nobody puts in the tutorial. Written by someone who has definitely taken down prod. All post are free and public. Email delivery kicks in at 100 subscribers. chaotictoejam.substack.com

chaotictoejam.substack.com

Chaos, Committed | Joanne Skiles, PhD | Substack

Cloud architecture, AI in production, and the parts of engineering nobody puts in the tutorial. From an engineer who's taken down prod. Click to read Chaos, Committed, by Joanne Skiles, PhD, a Substac...

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

AWS just put a billion dollars behind embedding vendor engineers in your codebase. The system runs when they leave. Is it understood? New episode: "feat: embed a stranger in your codebase" open.spotify.com/episode/6S8z...

feat: embed a stranger in your codebase

Chaotic Commits | Software, AI, and Uncomfortable Truths · Episode

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Got a text at 8:30pm: "we are logging out all of tenant configs secrets in plain text in prod" The cause: a raise e re-raising an exception that happened to be carrying a config object with no safe representation. What you log is an architectural decision. Most teams just never decide it on purpose

What you log is an architectural decision

(you just forgot to make it)

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Two junior engineers. One whiteboard. ~4 markers. We built the right thing and had no idea it had a name. That gap between knowing a concept and reaching for it is real, and almost nobody talks about it directly. New post: chaotictoejam.substack.com/p/the-index-is-built

chaotictoejam.substack.com

The index is built

(and nobody told you that was the job)

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

The best tutorial is written by someone who got stuck at the exact place you're going to get stuck.

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Got featured in DEV's Top 7 this week for building a cyberpunk cat RPG to teach production AI architecture. Idempotency and RAG grounding, but make it feline. dev.to/aws-builders...

dev.to

I Built a Cyberpunk Cat RPG to Teach Production AI Architecture

The screen loads. You pick your character class (TabbyWarrior, SiameseMage, MaineCoonPaladin,...

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

I built a cyberpunk cat RPG to teach production AI architecture on AWS. Yes, really. Full writeup on DEV including the $700/month OpenSearch surprise. dev.to/aws-builders... #AWS #AIAgents #Serverless

dev.to

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Full walkthrough on YouTube + all 3 CDK stacks in the repo, ready to deploy. Video: youtu.be/kv-OnMqwCLs?... Repo: github.com/chaotictoejam/url-shortener-aws

github.com

GitHub - chaotictoejam/url-shortener-aws

Contribute to chaotictoejam/url-shortener-aws development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Here's the thing: the "best" answer depends entirely on what you need. Variable traffic with no idle cost? Lambda. Can't containerize, need OS control? EC2. Existing Express app, zero server ops? ECS Express Mode.

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

AWS has 12 ways to deploy a Node.js app. I built the same URL shortener 3 ways to find out which one actually makes sense. Lambda. EC2. ECS Express Mode. All in TypeScript. All with AWS CDK. 🧵

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Things that will pull you out of a Spiderman sleepover with a four-year-old: - Nothing - Production tenant secrets being logged in plain text New episode: "raise e: the line that logged everything" open.spotify.com/episode/1Myi...

raise e: the line that logged everything

Chaotic Commits | Software, AI, and Uncomfortable Truths · Episode

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

FYI Proton is amazing... just leaving that here

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

AWS ECS has at least three IAM roles that are easy to mix up: * Task Role → what your container can do * Task Execution Role → what ECS needs to launch your container * Service-Linked Role → what ECS needs to manage infrastructure Took me an embarrassingly long time to stop confusing them. 😅

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

The funniest part of CDK: sometimes you need to deploy twice. First deploy to get the endpoint. Second deploy to pass the endpoint back in as config. Infrastructure-as-code has footguns too.

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Firefox's security model is stricter than Chrome's by default. So when something works in Chrome and breaks in Firefox, it means Firefox found a real problem, and Chrome was just being polite about it.

Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Me: Adds OpenSearch Serverless to my project. sounds cheap, right? It's serverless AWS: $700.80/month minimum Me: 👁️👄👁️ "serverless" = no servers to manage. NOT "free when you're not using it" 4 OCUs × $0.24/hr × 730 hrs, whether you have 0 or 5,000 requests Always 👏 Check 👏 The 👏 Pricing 👏 Page.

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

The difference between a well-architected AWS environment and a chaotic one is usually not the services. It's whether anyone wrote down why those services were chosen.

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Joanne Skiles, PhD @chaotictoejam.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Google announced at I/O that the era of blue links is over. AI answers now. You're going to have conversations that are synthesized and "efficient". I made a bonus episode about why that bothers me, and it's not because I'm nostalgic. open.spotify.com/episode/67Xb...

(bonus) cache miss: the search for something google won't let you find