iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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

I didn’t have enough characters to add “seemingly” 😉 Thanks for the explanation!

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 24/04/2026

They've had a *lot* of issues this past week or two...

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 24/04/2026

Maybe, although I think I saw a separate Copilot incident. What was happening?

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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...

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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 · 24/03/2026

I must be tired, my first thought was 'but "com" is only 3 letters'.

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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 · 12/03/2026

I'd say that was a data durability problem and demand 11 9s.

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 11/03/2026

If I never have to get another DUNS number assigned it will be too soon.

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 09/03/2026

It's not trolling, it's a lifestyle choice!

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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 · 03/03/2026

Looks great! Love the shading on the bones.

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 02/03/2026

I interviewed at a number of companies in January. A few allowed AI in the coding interviews with a goal of seeing how you used it. It wasn't across the board, but more common than I expected.

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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 · 22/02/2026

"Wintry mix" always makes me think of salad.

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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 · 15/02/2026

They even resisted using Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” in that last episode.

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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 · 07/02/2026

I’ve been firmly in the IDE for a long time, it was just way more convenient with the test on save automations, finding references and go to definition. AI tools are making some of the workflow automations less critical, but I still feel more comfortable being able to navigate the code myself.

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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 · 28/01/2026

Why not both? Multiple tasks in-progress at once, but never working on more than one concurrently.

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 28/01/2026

Oof, that sounds rough. Glad you're feeling better.

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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

Great reasons 🙂 The family themes were sure strong in that one.

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 23/01/2026

Holiday favorite because of the one scene set at Christmas?

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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 · 16/01/2026

So are you…having a good time?

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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 · 14/01/2026

These are delightful, like little poems. Or Burmashave ads.

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Tom Elliott @telliott.me · 14/01/2026

Noooo, not another one, lol.

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