Brian Scanlan

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...

❤️

(loved the implicit references to HEAnet from Colm :) )

My fave talks from re:Invent:

Eric talks about network defence: www.youtube.com/watch?v=65mX...

Marc talks about metastability etc.:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvHd...

colmmacc talks about networking: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzpz...

This is my most watched vid on YouTube this year.

First 🤯 of re:Invent - AWS are using "hollow core fibre" to allow availability zone buildings to be further away from each other without breaking their intra-AZ latency requirements.

1000 days of Wordle.

That was stressful. Hopefully they'll play more than one show.

We need to run these migrations often enough. It’s very uncomfortable for us to block feature development. Our entire product is built on the realtime performance of our databases - we have zero margin on load, and backups are a crucial part of our compliance posture.

I think I need to take a few days off to think about this.

Yikes.

This hits hard.

2.7TB with 22 indexes