Xander Garbett
@xandergarbett.bsky.social
SRE or O11y engineer depending on the hat.
Or the even terser:
elapsed := time.Since(start)
I will say, that Joda time (and Java 8 time) set the gold standard for me.
date = date.with(next(WEDNESDAY));
Is magic when you need it!
docs.oracle.com/javase/8/doc...
elapsed := time.Since(start)
I will say, that Joda time (and Java 8 time) set the gold standard for me.
date = date.with(next(WEDNESDAY));
Is magic when you need it!
docs.oracle.com/javase/8/doc...
Temporal (Java Platform SE 8 )
docs.oracle.com
January 12, 2026 at 3:01 PM
Or the even terser:
elapsed := time.Since(start)
I will say, that Joda time (and Java 8 time) set the gold standard for me.
date = date.with(next(WEDNESDAY));
Is magic when you need it!
docs.oracle.com/javase/8/doc...
elapsed := time.Since(start)
I will say, that Joda time (and Java 8 time) set the gold standard for me.
date = date.with(next(WEDNESDAY));
Is magic when you need it!
docs.oracle.com/javase/8/doc...
Terminal bench feels kinda close in what you are describing: www.tbench.ai/news/announc...
I imagine that it would be a similar eval to the task structure, but with different skills to try the evals
I imagine that it would be a similar eval to the task structure, but with different skills to try the evals
Terminal-Bench
A benchmark for terminal agents
www.tbench.ai
January 8, 2026 at 2:26 PM
Terminal bench feels kinda close in what you are describing: www.tbench.ai/news/announc...
I imagine that it would be a similar eval to the task structure, but with different skills to try the evals
I imagine that it would be a similar eval to the task structure, but with different skills to try the evals
I saw @samwho.dev talking about their voice set up for coding, I think they were suggest Talon or MacWhisper for voice.
January 7, 2026 at 3:56 PM
I saw @samwho.dev talking about their voice set up for coding, I think they were suggest Talon or MacWhisper for voice.
Wow, that sounds horrible. Glad to hear it’s over, and looking forward to reading the retro.
December 18, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Wow, that sounds horrible. Glad to hear it’s over, and looking forward to reading the retro.
Works well in an internal setting, but would probably need to make it into the OTel client libs to be seamless.
December 9, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Works well in an internal setting, but would probably need to make it into the OTel client libs to be seamless.
When I was doing internal o11y at ClickHouse, for logs we’d mainly rely on the insane compression + SharedMergeTree (aka, blob store backed) engine. Was pretty cheap and pretty compressible.
I reckon something like a query time join could handle this. But you’d need to have pretty opinionated logs
I reckon something like a query time join could handle this. But you’d need to have pretty opinionated logs
December 9, 2025 at 1:47 PM
When I was doing internal o11y at ClickHouse, for logs we’d mainly rely on the insane compression + SharedMergeTree (aka, blob store backed) engine. Was pretty cheap and pretty compressible.
I reckon something like a query time join could handle this. But you’d need to have pretty opinionated logs
I reckon something like a query time join could handle this. But you’d need to have pretty opinionated logs
(More thinking aloud, sorry for spam) I guess just some reservoir sampling would work well here. Just make the service have a size quota, rather than log number quota.
December 8, 2025 at 6:38 PM
(More thinking aloud, sorry for spam) I guess just some reservoir sampling would work well here. Just make the service have a size quota, rather than log number quota.
Are you thinking head sampling in this case? My worry with tail sampling is always putting pressure on a few hot shards
December 8, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Are you thinking head sampling in this case? My worry with tail sampling is always putting pressure on a few hot shards
Probably too easy to make something degen with a few small changes and flood the blob store though.
December 8, 2025 at 6:28 PM
Probably too easy to make something degen with a few small changes and flood the blob store though.
Wonder if there’s any scope to upload some of the blobs directly to blob storage with some log collection smarts. So at the very least you don’t saturate the full pipeline e2e with very large payloads. If it’s content addressed storage you probably get most of the way there
December 8, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Wonder if there’s any scope to upload some of the blobs directly to blob storage with some log collection smarts. So at the very least you don’t saturate the full pipeline e2e with very large payloads. If it’s content addressed storage you probably get most of the way there
PEBCAK is another great one. “Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard”
November 27, 2025 at 12:19 PM
PEBCAK is another great one. “Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard”
on.ft.com/485QAfv Link to the article is you want.
Who’s right about AI: economists or technologists?
Forecasting the impact of artificial intelligence has become fraught, with evangelists pitched against sceptics
on.ft.com
November 11, 2025 at 6:19 AM
on.ft.com/485QAfv Link to the article is you want.
Literally the rest of the opinion piece is saying that this is unrealistic, given the chart is reporting data from somewhere else?
November 11, 2025 at 6:17 AM
Literally the rest of the opinion piece is saying that this is unrealistic, given the chart is reporting data from somewhere else?
404 on the Jagex link btw
October 15, 2025 at 8:35 AM
404 on the Jagex link btw
There is something about being able to _use_ your own product that simply makes it better. I think its one part of the reason iBlocks just did better.
October 4, 2025 at 9:19 PM
There is something about being able to _use_ your own product that simply makes it better. I think its one part of the reason iBlocks just did better.
I use GWR reasonably often, and do enjoy getting the emails from the system unchanged from 5 years ago. I can tell because the GWR logo is still the slightly pixelated one because they couldn’t get us the assets for go-live, and no one has complained!
October 4, 2025 at 9:03 PM
I use GWR reasonably often, and do enjoy getting the emails from the system unchanged from 5 years ago. I can tell because the GWR logo is still the slightly pixelated one because they couldn’t get us the assets for go-live, and no one has complained!
I have very fond memories of working at iBlocks, a tiny company against Fujitsus and Wordlines behemoths, and just winning and delivering against their glacial pace. I think they still run all the data distribution for the industry (fares, routing, timetables via the dtd)
October 4, 2025 at 8:56 PM
I have very fond memories of working at iBlocks, a tiny company against Fujitsus and Wordlines behemoths, and just winning and delivering against their glacial pace. I think they still run all the data distribution for the industry (fares, routing, timetables via the dtd)
I’ll also say, that there are still TOC run call centres and customer care that needs to exist, despite the automation. Not everyone is familiar, so you need that assistance too. But the case study of how much money got saved is cool! tracsis-iblocks.com/case-studies...
Delay repay for Go-Ahead | Case study | Tracsis
Go-Ahead approached iBlocks looking for a solution that could significantly reduce the cost of processing Delay Repay claims, reduce time from claim submission to award and flag fraudulent claims.
tracsis-iblocks.com
October 4, 2025 at 8:49 PM
I’ll also say, that there are still TOC run call centres and customer care that needs to exist, despite the automation. Not everyone is familiar, so you need that assistance too. But the case study of how much money got saved is cool! tracsis-iblocks.com/case-studies...
Yeah, there is some matching that makes the booking system line up, but there were a few failed pushes to make it unified that never made it to the end. Too much of the industry was split into parts run by vendors. Too much politicking by RDG and bigger players!
October 4, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Yeah, there is some matching that makes the booking system line up, but there were a few failed pushes to make it unified that never made it to the end. Too much of the industry was split into parts run by vendors. Too much politicking by RDG and bigger players!
So, really, it’s already been hived off to be a separate company! It was pretty much 3-4 people who built and ran the system, hitting 85-90% automation rate on the claims if I remember.
October 4, 2025 at 8:35 PM
So, really, it’s already been hived off to be a separate company! It was pretty much 3-4 people who built and ran the system, hitting 85-90% automation rate on the claims if I remember.
One of the magical things we could do was automatically link advance purchase tickets to the delayed trains. So part of the system automatically emails customers on delayed advance purchase trains
October 4, 2025 at 8:22 PM
One of the magical things we could do was automatically link advance purchase tickets to the delayed trains. So part of the system automatically emails customers on delayed advance purchase trains
The delay repay bit of Avanti, GWR, SWR, Southern and ThamesLink (among others!) is all run by one company external to the TOCs. Used to be a tiny company called iBlocks who got bought by Tracisis. I helped build parts of that DR system!
October 4, 2025 at 8:20 PM
The delay repay bit of Avanti, GWR, SWR, Southern and ThamesLink (among others!) is all run by one company external to the TOCs. Used to be a tiny company called iBlocks who got bought by Tracisis. I helped build parts of that DR system!
ClickHouse does this (and has for some time!) clickhouse.com/docs/materia...
It scales pretty well, we handle 10s of millions of events per second in our clusters without really having to worry about it! And you can chain them to so A -> B -> C data flows can happen
It scales pretty well, we handle 10s of millions of events per second in our clusters without really having to worry about it! And you can chain them to so A -> B -> C data flows can happen
Incremental materialized view | ClickHouse Docs
How to use incremental materialized views to speed up queries
clickhouse.com
August 25, 2025 at 8:40 AM
ClickHouse does this (and has for some time!) clickhouse.com/docs/materia...
It scales pretty well, we handle 10s of millions of events per second in our clusters without really having to worry about it! And you can chain them to so A -> B -> C data flows can happen
It scales pretty well, we handle 10s of millions of events per second in our clusters without really having to worry about it! And you can chain them to so A -> B -> C data flows can happen
ClickHouse instances out there, which is perfect for dogfooding the product! We can find the issues that happen at scale and feed that into development.
June 21, 2025 at 7:13 AM
ClickHouse instances out there, which is perfect for dogfooding the product! We can find the issues that happen at scale and feed that into development.
It’s a tricky balance, and we’re trying to shift things (slowly). The main problem is if you are used to being able to get onto any ClickHouse instance and do "select from query_log", that’s the expectation going forwards. There is a secondary benefit though, in that LogHouse is one of the larger
June 21, 2025 at 7:13 AM
It’s a tricky balance, and we’re trying to shift things (slowly). The main problem is if you are used to being able to get onto any ClickHouse instance and do "select from query_log", that’s the expectation going forwards. There is a secondary benefit though, in that LogHouse is one of the larger