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

​​We continue to raise funds for 3 laptops for the Air Defense unit (1st Corps of Azov).

You can donate at this Monobank jar (international cards with Apple Pay work):

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

So far, one laptop is acquired, so there are two more to go!

#donations #Ukraine

I think it was Stafford Beer who raised concerns about new cybernetics and AI developments being applied in the "old ways" and thus missing their potential. "Hammering nails with a microscope" sort of things.

In his article "The Agentic Software Factory is the Wrong Metaphor" Rob West makes a similar argument about the new trend of AI-powered "software factories". This is not an anti-AI piece. Quite the contrary: it argues that the true value of software development lies in understanding the domain and customer requirements, and constantly picking up (and pivoting to) an optimal solution among the everchanging requirements and new context coming in.

Rob argues that this is where the application of AI may yield the most benefits. Without this component, the factory analogy leads to the "more software - more better" mindset, and we can all see what happens then.

#ai #culture

​​My colleague from the previous job wrote an article about him fixing a bottleneck in ArgoCD (bug is in version 3.4, fix is in 3.5).

"When a Routine Argo CD Upgrade Slowed Everything Down" would be interesting not only as an investigation story, but also as a cautionary tale for those, who write Kubernetes controllers.

The gist is that a Kubernetes API call on a hot path may be difficult to catch in the smoke tests but can easily become a bottleneck when reconciling many resources. Yet, you may need to fetch some resources from the API. For cases like that, Kubernetes' client-go has so-called informers that watch API resources for changes and keep the objects in a local cache. With informers you trade the speed for eventual consistency. This is what the fix is about.

#kubernetes #cicd #argocd

Lately, a bunch of websites ask me to create a passkey. "Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them." is a nice technical primer on what passkeys actually are.

Also, you are adults; it's not my job to tell you what to use and what not. I'm just sharing articles that I find interesting here.

UPD: the issue with passkeys is the remote attestation i.e. a server can dictate the client what passkeys are acceptable and what passkeys are not. This is a tl;dr for more details read the article.

#security

After a whole month of silence, CatOps Digest is back!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2026-11-06

#digest #newsletter

​​​​ We continue with a fundraiser for 3 laptops for the Air Defense unit (1st Corps of Azov).

You can donate at this Monobank jar (international cards with Apple Pay work):

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

So far, one laptop is acquired, so there are two more to go!

#donations #Ukraine

Sometimes, people tell me that I don’t post much practical material.

So, here you are: a guide for how to resize StatefulSet’s persistent volumes without downtime.

It comes with asterisks, though. Depending on what you run as a StatefulSet, how many replicas do you have, your traffic profile, and environment (cloud vs on-premises); you may actually have downtime. So, I’d rather call it “without recreation”. Yet, the author chose the word “downtime”, so I kept it as-is.

#kubernetes