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...

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.

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.

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

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

Conference swag idea: board books. Narrow audience, but if your kid imprints on it.. you’re going to read it many dozens of times. Not sure if it will be positive association or “if I have to read this name one more time..” 😅

I needed to author some simple code yesterday without an LLM. It’s been ~1.5 years probably since I’ve seriously written code by hand. 1. I had an initial spike of fear that maybe I had forgotten (I hadn’t) 2. I didn’t have an editor downloaded/installed (just used vi) 🤔

Moving to Germany, we've had to change the way we eat. It was hard, so I uploaded the German health guidelines into a claude project and had it plan meals for us. It's been mostly good. These are those recipes (with updates from having tasted them). recipes.abrah.ms

Grass and train tracks and dandelions. Solarpunk as fuck and I love it.

German cellphone plan was €10/mo for 20gb of 5g speeds. Bananas.

In Berlin, we walked 2 blocks and passed 4 actually good playgrounds. This is a paradise for kids. Little hard on parents trying to get somewhere. I’ll take it.

Just walked into a U-bahn and the smell gave me strong sense-memories of the NYC subway. Must be the lubricants or leaking fluids or something? 👃😍

Kid (6) just woke me up at 6:30am on a Saturday.. fully awake.. asking for a sister. 🫠

At medium-sized companies, the scaling wins are almost embarrassingly available. Nobody's picked the low-hanging fruit yet because nobody's had time to look. I wrote about my experience with a Java search service before Black Friday & getting it to 3x peak traffic. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-03...

I prefer CLIs over MCPs almost unanimously due to context management. I wrote about it here: justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-03...

Hello from @eurosky.social! I'll be in Berlin in 16 days and this feels, in many ways, like the start of something beautiful.

The thing I'm most excited about w/ all of these agents running around is the hope that we'll get ergonomic solutions to delegated identity and tight permission scopes for access control.

Wrote up the full story of how we went from 150 flaky tests to 2 at Thrive Market.. and what happened when we deleted them (nothing broke).

New job is going to be on Azure and it feels like I'm swapping from Dewalt to Makita.

I spent some time last weekend hacking up my own harness. The code isn't relevant, but I hit on a few things which I think are novel. I use kernel-level isolation instead of docker containers and I'm doing direct `claude -p` invocations instead of API based billing. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02...

Someone a decade+ younger than I asked me if I saw the Matrix in theaters and how cool that must have been

Reading the reports coming out of EU Open Source Week and I'm very jealous. 👀

I know we often act like it's not a social network.. but who are your favorite people to follow on github? I need more folks in my gitstreams daily digest.

Actually wrote down how it all works. :) justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02...

Finger on the pulse. 💓👀

I finally built something I designed 15 years ago: FRM, a CLI-based CRM for keeping up with friends. It connects to your contacts via CardDAV, lets you set how often you want to talk to someone, and logs when you do. Simple and self-owned. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02...

Just played with using Playwright to generate demo videos for features - you can script interactions, add cursor movement, annotations, and even title cards! I posted an example using it for a flagd UI. Way faster/more evergreen than screen recording + editing justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02...

I was learning about embeddings and thought: I could combine the embeddings of my knowledge graph vs a book and those might serve as the basis of a "diff" so I could tell what I might learn from reading it... so I wrote that, using my personal notes. This was the result: github.com/justinabrahm...

Stumbled upon a neat pattern for AI design doc reviews: ask the AI to recommend specific "colleagues" to review your proposal, each with unique expertise. The recommendations evolve as you address concerns! justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02...

LLMs fail with vague requirements. Humans do too. The fix: better specs, not better prompts. Pair on specs with product, use adversarial reviewers, treat review as system feedback not gatekeeping. As reimplementation costs → zero, "recompute from spec" makes sense. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-01...

Wrote about my release of agent-chat, a chat room UI for watching AI agents coordinate work in real-time. Nothing to setup. It just tails files on disk. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-01...

For folks using #gastown or multiclaude, I wrote a little utility which will let you tap into how the agents communicate back and forth so you can watch the work output. github.com/justinabrahm...

It’s so wild that I can book an international apartment over the internet. Berlin apartment secure! Next major milestone is the visa appointment at the consulate.

Wrote up my initial impressions of Dan Lorenc's multiclaude - a CLI-driven approach to managing a bunch of claude code sessions. It's unix-y, unobtrustive and auto-merges green PRs. The catch is your CI better be bulletproof. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-01...

Playing Dragonwood w my 6yo. Had Claude write a tool to help visualize probability in less than the amount of time it takes to remember the rules.

In thinking about orchestrated LLMs, I'm feeling a big tension with how software changes currently versus what it will need to look like. To that end, I ideated with an LLM about what this world could look like. This is what we came up with. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-01...

If you, like me, want to link to Steve Yegge's "stages of agentic adoption" thing... I made a permalink. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-01...

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Steve Yegge's Gas Town and what it means for folks working with LLMs. This is my understanding and what it means for a "level 7" LLM user. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-01...

Trying to learn how to use LLMs is a pain. So many of the day-to-day invocations are hard to pick up. Pairing with people isn’t very scalable. I think this will help me show folks how. For my coworkers, at a minimum. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-01...

We had a good run

A tool to read confluence documents from the CLI (for you or your LLM of choice). github.com/justinabrahm...

Started to read Hum at the local library. It’s a book about how AI displaced someone’s job and they had been unemployed for months. They were given 10 months salary to allow a VC backed startup to experiment on their face. They wanted to afford rent, chapstick & soda. Had to stop reading. Too real.

At a class review for my kid’s grade and the teacher described themselves as a “warm demander”. Warmth, but with clear and strong expectations. Love it.

Do we have a name for medium sized services? Not monoliths. Not microservices. Middle sized. Mezzo-services? Is that unnecessarily cutesy?

So I've been hacking on ATChess. For folks who are making multi-player things in ATProto land.. how are you actually testing things? Creating additional test accounts and oauthing them in under separate browser instances or something?

One way to keep hope alive is entering a raffle

Two dollars?!?! Oh. Right.

Peak Portland hipster shit. The trendy bakery/coffee shop is playing gospel hymns from my youth. Wild.

Look at this sick night wing dragon my 6yo made.

Vibe coding a UI for better code review and hit my Claude usage limit. Took the opportunity to read the ~7k lines of slop. Realized I had difficulty teasing apart “this is bad” from “this doesn’t match my 10 year old understanding of front end development”.