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Tom Elliott

@telliott.me
478 followers 1.4K following 1K posts

DevOps enthusiast. Posts bi-weekly on thefridaydeploy.substack.com, occasional public speaker.

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 26/04/2026
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...
telliott.me
Pipelines: The Forgotten SLO
4/26/2026
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 24/04/2026
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...
githubstatus.com
Incident with Pull Requests
GitHub's Status Page - Incident with Pull Requests.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 17/04/2026
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...
Entrance of the Modal office, showing the company logo and a "Welcome to Modal" signEmpty desks at the Modal office
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 16/04/2026
Name that tune! Bip a dip a dee. Beep. Bip a dip a dee.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 27/03/2026
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.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 27/03/2026
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...
telliott.me
Why merge queues?
3/26/2026
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 26/03/2026
Have you heard the one about the company that makes zippers? IYKYKKYK
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 22/03/2026
A teachable moment for AI
Thank you for catching my mistake! It's important to use actual API features rather than making them up.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 22/03/2026
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.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 20/03/2026
Comparing two rate limiting strategies, one that's (almost) pleasant to work with, another that is very much not. telliott.me/posts/how-fr...
telliott.me
How friendly are your rate limits?
3/19/2026
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 13/03/2026
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.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 13/03/2026
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...
telliott.me
Tech interviewing will always be broken
3/13/2026
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 06/03/2026
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...
telliott.me
How much code *should* you review?
3/6/2026
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 06/03/2026
Wait, was Maria (dear as she was) including him in an activity or setting the beat for the song?
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 27/02/2026
A weekend project to explore GitHub Actions deployments and Pulumi! telliott.me/posts/approv...
telliott.me
Approving deployments with GitHub Actions
2/27/2026
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 26/02/2026
Historians have recently uncovered a centuries-old artwork depicting Norman soldiers fighting alligators in a marsh. They call it the Bayou Tapestry.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 20/02/2026
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...
telliott.me
Rehousing my blog
2/20/2026
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 18/02/2026
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”
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 13/02/2026
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...
open.substack.com
Is GitHub getting less reliable?
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.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 09/02/2026
"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."
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 06/02/2026
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...
open.substack.com
Plur1bus: accidental AI allegory
Is Plur1bus secretly about AI? Officially, no, but that didn't stop me seeing shadows of GPUs in almost every scene.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 30/01/2026
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...
open.substack.com
Yes, you should still learn to code
Join me as I recount a recent experience with an enthusiastic but wrong LLM and what I had to do to dig out of the hole.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 24/01/2026
Beyond Palindrome! Two men enter, reten nem owt.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 23/01/2026
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...
open.substack.com
We won't need CI in 5 years
The way we build software is changing, and the way we deploy is going to have to change right along with it. What we consider to be "good" CI today may be very different from tomorrow's definition
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 20/01/2026
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.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 19/01/2026
I think the Fallout series just invented a new trope: Gory Discretion Shot Fakeout
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 19/01/2026
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!
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 16/01/2026
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...
open.substack.com
Can Git back a REST API? (part 5 - conclusions!)
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!
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 15/01/2026
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.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 10/01/2026
Wait, you’re telling me that that Chinese robot they’ve been showing off is called the T800? Holy Torment Nexus, Batman.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 09/01/2026
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...
open.substack.com
Can Git back a REST API? (part 4 - stability)
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.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 06/01/2026
I write fairly regularly, but always feel like I don't read as much as I should. Looking back over the past week, I've read a bunch of articles, so why do I still feel like I'm behind the curve? Subscriptions. (thread follows)
A stack of books with an open book on top.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 06/01/2026
I just learned about NOC the whale. Incredibly creepy until you hear the recording. Then only a bit creepy.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 01/01/2026
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...
ocuroot.com
Blog | Winding Down Ocuroot
After 18 months of working on Ocuroot, I think it's time to move on. It's been a heck of a ride and quite the learning experience!
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 31/12/2025
Someone had too much fun
A gingerbread man covered in fairy lights laying face down on the ground
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 29/12/2025
Started on a just-for-fun project yesterday. Rendering all the buildings in NYC in 3D. opendata.cityofnewyork.us has a ton of great data sets, including this building data! Learned a ton about optimizing scenes. Had to get creative with reusing and grouping meshes. #buildinpublic
View of a 3D Map of NYC buildings, showing Manhattan as viewed from above south Brooklyn
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 27/12/2025
Squirrel footprints on the scaffold! Magical.
Trail of small footprints in snow on a platform
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Reposted by Tom Elliott
Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 27/12/2025
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.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 27/12/2025
The more I watch The Traitors, the more Alan Cumming sounds like Moira Rose.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 26/12/2025
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...
open.substack.com
Looking below the surface of Git - what the heck is a tree?
You may or may not have heard about trees in Git, but you've definitely worked with them! This post provides an overview of what trees are, how they fit together and walks through an example.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 26/12/2025
Low budget horror movie concept: haunted cootie catcher
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 25/12/2025
Watching “The Holiday” with my wife. We put it on as background but forgot how much we enjoyed it. Now gripped. Cooking can wait.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 24/12/2025
My bones are so brittle, but I always drink plenty of…
Bottles of “malk”
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 24/12/2025
Given chocolate drinks weren’t sweetened until the 16th century, Judy must have spent 800 years making some bitter-ass cocoa.
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Reposted by Tom Elliott
Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 20/12/2025
Good grief this might be the most beautiful video I’ve ever watched. You’ll need to have some idea of how LLMs work internally to follow along, but the findings of the papers presented in this video are incredible. youtu.be/D8GOeCFFby4?...
youtu.be
The most complex model we actually understand
YouTube video by Welch Labs
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 20/12/2025
Hear me out: Mobile Zoot Suit Gundam
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 19/12/2025
Can you use Git as storage for a REST API? Over the past few weeks I've managed to get something that works and is even kind of performant. This week I've been trying to handle concurrent requests. Let's see how well it fares when things are busy! open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...
open.substack.com
Can Git back a REST API? (part 3 - concurrency)
Now the Git-backed REST API is a bit more performant, I focus on what happens when you have multiple users at once.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 16/12/2025
GitHub announced they're going to charge for self-hosted runners. I can see the why, given they still run the control plane. There's still benefit to self-hosting if you have larger runners, but with the other price cut, it's potentially a big change for some. resources.github.com/actions/2026...
resources.github.com
Pricing changes for GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions pricing update: Discover lower runner rates (up to 39% off) following a major re-architecture for faster, more reliable CI/CD.
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 12/12/2025
Part 2 of my attempts to back a REST API with a GitHub repo. After seeing painfully slow performance with the CLI, I went a little lower-level and started messing with the server protocols directly. The results were surprising, in the best way! open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...
open.substack.com
Can Git back a REST API? (Part 2 - git protocols)
Running a REST API off of the Git CLI tool was slow to say the least. Can I make the API a little faster by interacting with the Git server more directly?
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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 05/12/2025
Git is great for storing code, and maybe the occasional image or two. It also makes it easy for teams to collaborate and deal with fine-grained changes. But could it be used as a more arbitrary data store? open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...
open.substack.com
Can Git back a REST API? (Part 1 - the naive approach)
Git is basically a fancy file store with history, so can it be applied to use cases other than source control? Come with me as I try to repurpose Git into a backing store for a simple REST API
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