Brian Scanlan

"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.

From Aurora to PlanetScale: Intercom’s Database Evolution with Brian Scanlan Screaming in the Cloud

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.

When mountains go on fire, there’s talk of randos being careless with BBQs. Definitely not systematic burning by sheep farmers.

Doing a new talk!

Sebadoh mention on Second Captains’ Oasis podcast on Friday had me no longer thinking about Oasis.

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.”

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the importance of building “10x engi…

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...

CVE-2025-6031 - Insecure device pairing in end-of-life Amazon Cloud Cam

aws.amazon.com/security/sec...

The perfect security bulletin.

Tune.

Good time to get out the 6 hour Pet Sounds box-set.

Ah.

???

“I may as well break it properly for you now”

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

cynical emoji reply

Authenticating users in the Messenger with JSON web tokens (JWTs) | Intercom Help How to protect your Messenger and user sessions against cross-user impersonation, session theft and more.

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...

YouTube video by Clannad - Topic Na Buachaillí Álainn (Remastered 2021)

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...

❤️