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• Post #4342696

  Software engineering research question I’ve always wondered about (although less relevant in the age of AI): are developers more productive when working in their preferred language compared to working in a language imposed upon them due to business constraints?

• Post #3158193

  Bonus blog post for today about my instinctual revulsion towards AI slop: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/06/06/i-cant-bear-to-read-ai-generated-prose/

• Post #2660300

  Cloudflare announces a huge layoff and then, the very same day, an availability zone in AWS’s us-east-1 region loses power due to a “thermal event”. Coincidence??? Well, yes

• Post #2660299

  I’m very concerned about the aliens already walking among us who are going to insider trade on this market: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxaliens/aliens/kxaliens-27

• Post #2660298

  New blog post about flipping the bozo bit: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/09/flipping-the-bozo-bit-on-flips-the-learning-off/

• Post #2660297

  According to the data, we shouldn’t trust the data

• Post #2387305

  I’ve heard of “Nimrod” primarily because of

• Post #2134541

  Today's Anthropic outage and the GitHub blog post about their availability inspired me to write this post: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/28/life-comes-at-you-fast/

• Post #2134539

  RE: https://mas.to/@ezrasf/116501088268674877 We want goblin mode!

• Post #2134538

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@levelbot/116501160117851626 There’s no way this reading is accurate

• Post #2134535

  Tired: old code that calls new code (extensibility!) Wired: old code that breaks new code (latent failures!)

• Post #2134534

  Seamlessness is, indeed, a worthwhile goal; systems fail at the seams.

• Post #2134533

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@regehr/116513311049264041 Is there a burn ward nearby?

• Post #2134532

  Saturation: a never-ending series. https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/ql942tw29yl6

• Post #2039148

  It's counterintuitive, but you can learn about the nature of successful work from incidents, even though the incident was a failure case. I wrote a blog post about that here: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/02/how-incidents-can-teach-us-about-whats-already-working-well/

• Post #1814334

  New blog post about Erik Hollnagel's Safety-II model: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/26/the-normal-work-of-creating-reliability/

• Post #1711226

  All metrics are subjective, it’s just that you don’t see the subjectivity because it’s baked in at metric definition time. What you decide to measure and how you decide to measure it are both subjective decisions.

• Post #1687566

  Prediction: Within the next two years, the New York Times will write a story about people who are unable to prove they are not AIs (à la CAPTCHAs).

• Post #1687565

  Automation can only solve your reliability problems if that automation is perfect. But if you were capable of writing perfect software, we wouldnt be talking about your reliability problems. Automation is only part of the reliability story, you’ve got to be ready for when it breaks, too. Because I promise you, your reliability automation is going to break. Will you be ready for when it does?

• Post #1687563

  RE: https://techhub.social/@giflian/116409536511194822 What a time to be alive

• Post #1687562

  Oops! All AI companies!

• Post #1648382

  Jim Calabro did an excellent write-up of a recent Bluesky outage, I learned a lot from it. I wrote my own post here: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/12/thoughts-on-the-bluesky-public-incident-write-up/

• Post #1346661

  Ad blockers, but for AI

• Post #967721

  Managing the risk of saturation, AI edition: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4151196/anthropic-throttles-claude-subscriptions-to-meet-capacity.html

• Post #967720

  If you celebrate Passover, which of these do you commonly eat at a Passover seder?

• Post #967718

  Looking for a little less machine learning and a little more human learning

• Post #801680

  New blog post on the surprising increases in load faced by AI companies and the operational consequences: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/03/07/grow-fast-and-overload-things/

• Post #801679

  GitHub's had some availability issues lately. Their CTO wrote a blog post with some details about recent incidents. I wrote a quick post with my reaction here: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/03/12/quick-thoughts-on-github-ctos-post-on-availability/

• Post #801677

  The consequences of being able to generate code with AI much more quickly than we can validate that code is Nature’s way of teaching us about Erik Hollnagel’s ETTO Principle. https://www.erikhollnagel.com/ideas/etto-principle/index.html

• Post #801675

  You get what the system is optimized for.