"Encryption is not security"

In football, kicking a ball really hard isn't what wins games.

Farmers give talks at conferences talking about "artisinal hand-maintained unix servers, not serverless functions"

Listen to @bscanlan.bsky.social talking to @quinnypig.com about how Intercom moved from AWS Aurora to @planetscale.com t.co/ZlRtVVr7Rs

Bought my sister a print of this for her birthday. Looks even better in real life.

Plot twist: Intercom's on-call system uses VOLUNTEERS, not conscripts. @bscanlan.bsky.social explains how they compensate engineers for after-hours work instead of mandating it by team assignment. Result? People actually want to join the rotation. 🎧 to the podcast:

13 Aurora clusters to a sleek move onto PlanetScale. Intercom’s database journey wasn’t just a migration, it was a rethink. On the latest Screaming in the Cloud, @bscanlan.bsky.social (Senior Principal Engineer @ Intercom) joins Corey Quinn to talk about..

The rumours are true - I did a podcast with Corey.

Doing a new talk!

Last year Intercom used 41.069 MTCO2e (metric tonnes of carbon dioxide) in our use of AWS. This is equivalent to the electricity used by 8 average homes in the USA. The vast majority of this was produced in the Sydney region - Australia sure loves burning coal.

You can just own things.

I started reading The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly, and there’s one line I really liked — something along the lines of: “If you find yourself saying, ‘Someone should do this,’ then you should probably do it.”

I just released my edit of "In Praise of 'Normal' Engineers": why the best engineering orgs in the world are the ones where ✨normal engineers✨ can consistently move fast, ship code, fix shit, help their users, and move the business forward...a little more, every day. charity.wtf/2025/06/19/i...

aws.amazon.com/security/sec... The perfect security bulletin.

I managed to tear my MCL on my left leg (grade 2) going down the outside waterslide in Center Parcs.

I still don't know how to pronounce JWT, but this is a really compelling replacement for how Intercom has been authenticating users until now. Great to see it in beta - obviously we already use it ourselves. www.intercom.com/help/en/arti...

I wrote up what happened the other day when Intercom broke: www.intercomstatus.com/us-hosting/i...

I can't believe that there's popular songs celebrating unvetted military age economic migrants: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxX...

Oh no - I see VPNs in my future. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/...

I wrote up an Intercom outage that happened this week: www.intercomstatus.com/us-hosting/i...

Reading Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" fascicles as they came out was incredibly key to discovering the Shuffle Sharding pattern, but I don't think I've ever written about it before ... news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4297...

My fave talks from re:Invent: Eric talks about network defence: www.youtube.com/watch?v=65mX... Marc talks about metastability etc.: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvHd... colmmacc talks about networking: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzpz...

First 🤯 of re:Invent - AWS are using "hollow core fibre" to allow availability zone buildings to be further away from each other without breaking their intra-AZ latency requirements.

1000 days of Wordle.

That was stressful. Hopefully they'll play more than one show.

This hits hard.

Going to this:

The old way: migrating our largest MySQL table takes 70-80 days and can contribute to occasional latency spikes. The new way on PlanetScale: migrating our largest MySQL table takes less than a week and Just Works.

I am proud to be associated with engineering fixes that would not look out of place in the Soviet space program.

First gig: Sunstroke ‘94. Or Suede if counting individual bands. Most recent: Max Richter Next: Ganavya

Looking forward to Friday.

Twitter's been pretty dead anyway 🫡