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...

Pipelines: The Forgotten SLO

4/26/2026

telliott.me

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...

Incident with Pull Requests

GitHub's Status Page - Incident with Pull Requests.

githubstatus.com

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...

Name that tune! Bip a dip a dee. Beep. Bip a dip a dee.

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.

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...

Why merge queues?

3/26/2026

telliott.me

Have you heard the one about the company that makes zippers? IYKYKKYK

A teachable moment for AI

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.

Comparing two rate limiting strategies, one that's (almost) pleasant to work with, another that is very much not. telliott.me/posts/how-fr...

How friendly are your rate limits?

3/19/2026

telliott.me

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.

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...

Tech interviewing will always be broken

3/13/2026

telliott.me

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...

How much code *should* you review?

3/6/2026

telliott.me

Wait, was Maria (dear as she was) including him in an activity or setting the beat for the song?

A weekend project to explore GitHub Actions deployments and Pulumi! telliott.me/posts/approv...

Approving deployments with GitHub Actions

2/27/2026

telliott.me

Historians have recently uncovered a centuries-old artwork depicting Norman soldiers fighting alligators in a marsh. They call it the Bayou Tapestry.

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...

Rehousing my blog

2/20/2026

telliott.me

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”

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...

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.

open.substack.com

"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."

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...

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.

open.substack.com

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...

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.

open.substack.com

Beyond Palindrome! Two men enter, reten nem owt.

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...

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

open.substack.com

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.

I think the Fallout series just invented a new trope: Gory Discretion Shot Fakeout

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!

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...

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!

open.substack.com

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.

Wait, you’re telling me that that Chinese robot they’ve been showing off is called the T800? Holy Torment Nexus, Batman.