A Cybersecurity books bundle by O’Reilly on Humble Bundle.

The bundle is fresh and is still active for 32 more days!

#books

​​I traded my personal information for this report, so you don’t have to!

DataDog presents to you the State of AI Engineering

There are some not so surprising findings, but also some less obvious things.

#ai #report

A colleague of mine wrote an article about data migrations.

Handling data migrations without anyone noticing.

This one specifically is about a data migration that took several days and involved some external systems.

Hopefully, these learnings will help you to design similar migrations at your place!

#data #programming

I’m going on a vacation, which means that I likely won’t post at all or post something very occasionally for the next 2 weeks.

Here are 2 AI-related book bundles on Humble Bundle, so I don’t just leave an informational message here.

- AI in Production by Manning - only 4 days left.
- GenAI and Agentic AI by BPB - 20 days left.

See you in the end of October!

While I’m still enjoying my vacation, this CVE is too interesting to pass by.

PwnEscape: Guest-to-Host KVM Escape (CVE-2026-99999).

First of all, it has a neat number, but it is also has 9.3 severity score.

This CVE describes how the IPv4 checksum check mechanism in Linux can be used to gain access to the host machine from a sandbox or a virtual machine.

The former article explains how this CVE was identified. And yes, it was found with help of AI, and apparently it dates back to the 2.x kernel versions. Modern kernels such as 6.x and 7.x are affected as well, although there are already security patches available.

Patch your stuff, especially if you’re providing resources for untrusted guests.

#security

Are you sure that it is a vacation, and not just location/activity change? Why I still see you checking CVEs at vacation? Go outside, idk, read book not emails and reddit 😜

Btw, happy Friday, everyone!

For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to highlight a fundraiser for 3 laptops for the Air Defense unit (1st Corps of Azov).

Strictly saying, that's a way to have heat, light, and gas, not only inside ourself, but in our houses too. So, please don't hesitate to donate:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4Xqw8mdW2W

#donations #Ukraine

​​​​Everyone who successfully in rush patched PHP, well, folks, I'm feel sorry for you

UPD. It's a different one vulnerability

So, you must patch everything!
- Browsers & OS ( to remove intermediate-CA with private key "4" )
- PHP and PHP apps
- Gitlab
- LiteLLM

I am back. 🙃
Also, today is Monday, which means it's time for a fundraiser. We continue helping to raise funds for 3 laptops for the Air Defense unit (1st Corps of Azov).

You can donate to this Monobank Jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4Xqw8mdW2W

#donations #Ukraine

Here's a story from a colleague of mine about RDS connection pooling and our endeavors with it.

Connection pooling. A long journey..

The main takeaway is that the RDS Proxy is nice and managed, but not a silver bullet suitable for all the cases. Similarly, pgbouncer is old and boring, but it gets the job done.

#aws #rds #databases

​​I traded my personal information for a report again, so you don't have to.

This time it's "The State of Developer Experience 2026" report by Atlassian.

I haven't read it fully yet - it is 24 pages long, and honestly I usually just skim through such reports. Still, here are some bullet points from the report's executive summary organized by me with some personal comments in italic:

- People still report productivity gains from AI, albeit less dramatic. There were previous reports that people use to overestimate the gains of AI in self-reported questionnaires, so this may be just a correction.
- The biggest reported bottlenecks are still out good-old frenemies: unclear requirements, context switches, technical debt, shifting priorities, etc. From the very beginning, many folks have been saying that writing code is just a part of software engineering.
- While the reports show local gains from AI overall, companies who get the most benefits from AI are those that reshape their SDLC for AI and create a coherent strategy for AI usage within the company.

#devex #ai

I have quite a few articles piled up in the “to read” queue for the time I was on vacation. So, I was not sure where to start and decided to read an article about reading. Going a bit meta, sorta speaking.

Here it is: You Are What You Read by Steve Huynh. This is a complementary article for another piece of his, but unfortunately that other article is now behind a paywall. I am also not sure if he wouldn't paywall this one as well. However, if you're subscribed, you can still find both articles in your inbox (thank you, Substack!).

The gist of that original article is that Amazon's writing culture is slowly getting blighted by AI: the main idea behind famous Amazon 6-pagers was that when someone puts in the effort of producing 4-6 pages of coherent text, they definitely thought the problem through. However, with AI, these pages can be generated without much effort and thought behind them, which completely removes the value of writing.

This problem is not unique to Amazon, here is an article from Clay about their AI writing policies and why they have them in the first place - Why Clay Has an AI Writing Policy.

Apparently, both articles from Steve and Clay went viral. None of them claim that AI should be forbidden or somehow restricted from wiritng - this is just not realistic. Yet, they advocate for a set of rules that contain the use of AI to preserve the idea behind practices and not just practices themselves.

If a reviewer asks, “What did you mean by this line?”, it’s not acceptable to reply with “Oh sorry, AI wrote that, just ignore it.”

#ai #culture

Terraform drift has always been PITA. Now, you have a ready-to-use GitHub Action to run tfdrift CLI to get your reports.

Terraform Drift Is Now a Native GitHub Security Alert is an article that explains how.

P.S. This article comes from Anton Babenko's weekly.tf newsletter. It's a great resource about Terraform, so make sure that you're subscribed if you're interested in Terraform.

#terraform #tofu #cicd

​​Adding some video content to the mix, which is, I think, suitable for a weekend.

Here’s a talk from Gergely Orosz aka The Pragmatic Engineer on the trends in the industry from as conference in NY this September.

https://youtu.be/Ru99FGJ_yuE?is=zYJrIOYbe8gsSQhp

I usually do not read comments to YouTube videos, but some comments here are interesting. Some of those repeat the same takes, but paint those in different colors, which adds the perspective to the whole ordeal.

#slides #ai