iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Recent thing I saw talked about the price in LLM tokens pre/post refactoring. I think there’s never been a better time to quantify tech debt in true financial terms.

030

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 03/10/2026

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

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 27/09/2026

I saw this in the past 2 weeks on either LinkedIn or Bluesky. Just seems like a GordonThought™

120

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 27/09/2026

Was it you who said this? Something like: moats are the right defense when you’re staying still.. but we haven’t gotten to where we’re going yet.

110

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 27/09/2026

It’s quite interesting how that exact thing applies to the people systems I spend most of my time on. “Hey folks. This is where we need to get to (get dependabot alerts down, SLIs defined, etc).. we’ve got a dashboard and a weekly meeting..” 🫠🫠

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 24/09/2026

Reading this, my initial take is “nah, that’s how you get Esptein’d”

100

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 24/09/2026

At least a prompt injection vector. ;) But yes, this seems neat. If these are somehow namespaced by wiki author, it might offer an interesting thing for shared context on a team, but doesn’t have other people messing with your notes / skills etc.

010

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 19/09/2026

I had a manual review practice. Just last night I’ve converted it to indiscriminately capture facts into “episodes” and then use agents to regularly mine the episodes for actual memories worth keeping. Excited to see how it performs.

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 11/09/2026

I definitely do. I've been playing around with "help me find unknown unknowns" or "help me increase the density in areas of my interest" for my obsidian setup. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02... is also probably up your alley as well. :) Hope you're well.

justin.abrah.ms

How to diff a book against your mind

Using a personal knowledge base, we can use embeddings to diff a book against your current knowledge to find novelty.

011

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 11/09/2026

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/

tools.justin.abrah.ms

Window-based SLOs

110

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 05/09/2026

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

010

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 01/09/2026

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

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 01/09/2026

I'm honestly surprised the agents aren't just standing up IRC servers

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 26/08/2026

Eyeball orbit top left red snail, definitely.

010

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 26/08/2026

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.ms

A skill for single-player agentic knowledge management

A 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.

120

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 23/08/2026

"Improving daily work is more important than doing daily work" ~Gene Kim

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 23/08/2026

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/

justin.abrah.ms

Justin Abrahms

Principal Engineer and Technical Leader. Transforming engineering organizations through platform excellence.

101

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 21/08/2026

Same. Gotta take the upsides when you can get them.

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 21/08/2026

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..

020

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 21/08/2026

I feel like we must have ours misconfigured bc I’ve basically never found the feedback to be exciting. 🤔

100

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 18/08/2026

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.

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 14/08/2026

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.ms

Concept to Cash: Initiative retrospectives and visualization

Modeling 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.

020

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 13/08/2026

Looks like a cursed pair of muppet eyes.

170

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 30/07/2026

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...

justin.abrah.ms

A framework for cataloguing technical debt

A simple framework for scoring technical debt so you know what to do now versus later

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 20/07/2026

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

020

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 17/07/2026

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

up close it says "pay bills", but further away or if you squint.. it says "day dream"

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 17/07/2026

Shit like this is why I moved to Germany from the US. I'm quite curious how heavy handed the algorithm will end up being, especially around censorship etc.

010

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 17/07/2026

has "never trust a statistic you didn't fake yourself" energy.

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 14/07/2026

Has “I just read it for the articles” vibes.

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 14/07/2026

So like the coolest, real life Pokédex?

020

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 14/07/2026

I signed up based on portal.eurosky.social. I was surprised that my time at Walmart and eBay were internationalized versions of those words (Chinese and Arabic respectively). Submitted a name correction. Interesting stuff.

portal.eurosky.social

Eurosky Portal

Your Portal to the Atmosphere

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 13/07/2026

It’s just a fall back for “yeah.. stuff looks normal” or “oh, something’s funky in the US metrics”. Nothing a human couldn’t do. But a human doesn’t always do it. Robot does.

010

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 13/07/2026

Of course you can. When you were last building a service, did you get all of your alerts right the first time with zero iteration?

100

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 13/07/2026

Yes, that is the job of a dashboard. Humans miss things / forget to look and having a summary is helpful. I’m not saying this is novel. Just helpful.

010

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 13/07/2026

One such loop which has been very nice for us: every weekday, look at our dashboards and post anything you think should be surfaced to the team.

220

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 12/07/2026

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.

161

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 11/07/2026

They have gobs of space and people like vices.

110

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 05/07/2026

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

justinabrahms.github.io

ncr — read a PR as a story

ncr turns a pull request into an outside-in narrative — call-path chapters instead of alphabetical files. Five real PRs rendered as stories.

010

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 05/07/2026

Just did this for my little code review tool I released yesterday. 18 issues found for ~$11, including "it silently drops lines to be reviewed". 😅 Thanks for the idea to run it for this. github.com/justinabrahm... were the outputs

github.com

Issues · justinabrahms/ncr

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

030

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 04/07/2026

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...

github.com

GitHub - 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

130

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 26/06/2026

My wife and I pronounce it “ronch” when we want to be fancy about it.

140

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 26/06/2026

I’m not going to look it up, but I’m hoping this is the US Mutant Ninja Turtles.

110

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 23/06/2026

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...

youtube.com

What we planned vs. what we shipped: A platform migration story - Justin Abrahms | PlatformCon 2026

YouTube video by Platform Engineering

000

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 17/06/2026

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.

130

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 10/06/2026

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.

010

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 03/06/2026

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

030

Justin Abrahms @justin.abrah.ms · 02/06/2026

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

120