CatOps

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to remind you about a fundraiser for a pickup truck for the Zaporizhzhia direction.

You can donate on this Monobank jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8Mjotj4Uei

#donations #Ukraine

Here’s Datadog’s take on the increased load on CI. In this article they explain how their gitretriever service works, and how it decreases the times and compute resources it takes to run thousands of builds.

#cicd

A new chapter of the CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2026-09-25

#digest #newsletter

Shopify wrote an article on them moving from React Native to the native code for their mobile apps. They were already ridiculed for this on Reddit for the lack of in-house knowledge of the native languages. However, I think this is a great precedent for AI. Apparently, if you know the end goal and you have enough of guardrails, you can do that. The argument that AI won't be able to debug something in the future is as applicable to humans as to AI.

At the same time, Shopify's CEO calls out that people are throwing "slop grenades" at each other. Yet, two things can be true at the same time. You can successfully use AI for major refactorings and throw "slop grenades" in the form of useless documents.

#ai #programming

A bunch of practice exams on Humble Bundle, if you're into this type of thing.

This offer ends in less than 2 days, so make up your mind quickly.

#courses

​​A good friend of the channel raises funds for his new unit (a small air defense unit). They are raising funds for tools and materials for their positions.

You can donate to this Monobank jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4SB2PtGPzV

#donations #Ukraine

There will be no digest today because I haven't posted much this week.

So, instead here is an article from Anthropic on how to deal with the strain that AI development and reviews put on CI. This is a real problem in the AI-driven SDLC, or so-called "software factories", but unlike code reviews and harnesses, it's not been talked about so much, unfortunately.

#cicd #ai

Why Distributed Databases Fail at Coordination Boundaries is a neat article on the areas to pay attention to when working with any distributed system, really.

#db

I don’t remember, if I shared this book bundle with you, but it won’t hurt to share it again.

Think like a programmer by No Starch Press.

#books

I recall, back in the day, there was a popular interview question: "What would you not automate in your job?" I haven't heard it for a while, but with AI now, maybe it's still relevant. Perhaps it's even more relevant than back then.

What SREs Should Automate — and Never Automate — with AI is an article about that. I would argue that the point about security incidents contradicts a bit to what was said earlier: if AI can collect the data for a normal incident, why cannot it do the same for the security one? A human would still stay in charge of the remediation and the final decision.

#sre #ai

An interesting article on how to configure AI reviews for Terraform plans with GitHub Actions and AWS Bedrock.

I don’t necessarily like the style of this article, but the content is cool. Now, I need to check how to do something similar with Atlantis. I presume, I could just trigger a GHA on a comment.

P.S. This article was brought to you by weekly.tf. If you actively work with Terraform, you may find this newsletter helpful. So, make sure to subscribe!

#terraform #ai

​​Today, I’d like to remind you about the fundraiser a friend of mine is doing. The goal is to raise 70k UAH for a pickup truck for Zaporizhzhia direction.

You can donate on this Monobank jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8Mjotj4Uei

#donations #Ukraine

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2026-09-04

#digest #newsletter

A nice visualization of Go dependencies.

It's interesting how you can instantly see packages that support hundreds, if not thousands, of others. I would have guessed that testify is popular, but I wouldn't have guessed that it's the most popular.

Also, I did not expect to see Viper and Cobra being so influential, even though I think they are cool.

#go #programming

Continuing with the topic of AI.

A colleague of mine wrote an article on how to attribute the cost with AWS Bedrock with code samples of how to enable it and the description of pitfalls we encountered along the way.

#aws #ai #finops

I already shared postmortems from both OpenAI and Hugging Face on the recent security incident when a frontier model broke out of its sandbox to search for a solution for its task.

Here is a more detailed writeup by OpenAI on this incident. Given that OpenAI has an intrinsic motivation to advertise their models, I would still take this with a pinch of salt, but it should be interesting.

I haven't read this article fully yet, but the start is promising.

#ai #security

​​For today's Donations Monday, I'd like to remind you about a fundraiser by a friend of mine. Its goal is to get 70k UAH for a pick up truck. So far, about 20k has been raised. Let's make it happen!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8Mjotj4Uei

#donations #Ukraine

I've written an article about load testing of Apollo Router - a GraphQL API gateway.

It's mostly pictures, so it should be easy to follow :)

#graphql #load_test

Cloudflare shares a story of how they automated GitHub issues triage with AI for their Astro project.

It neatly shows the evolution from a collection of skills to a semi(?) autonomous state machine that has taken the project to zero open issues.

They also share the workflows they use publicly, but in my opinion the more valuable lesson here is the step-by-step model of how they got there.

#ai #open_source

A great article about Postgres' MVCC, or rather, issues with MVCC and the ways other engines tried to mitigate those.

It has a neat comparison of the tradeoffs, strong and weak parts of different implementations. It also provides insights into how different DB engines work.

A quote:

... if someone tells you a database has solved multi-versioning, ask them the four questions: where do old versions live, which way do chains point, what do indexes point at, and who cleans up. Then ask what happens when a transaction stays open over lunch.

#postgres #databases