Chad

Chad

@chadfennell.com

The Ted Lasso of Software Consultants

101 followers260 following209 posts

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A 10k Sinatra controller, monkey patched abandoned ORM projects, JRuby. All those moments will be lost in time as AI rewrites them.

I once inherited a python system that handled about $100m in ARR. It was a single Django class that was 25k lines long and had zero tests or docs that always called out to MySQL and postgres via fork+exec rather than actually using those client libraries

Chad reposted

Kansas Dem Sen. nominee Adam Hamilton on trans rights: “I don’t think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them. I understand one thing really clearly when it comes to transgender people, and that is Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor as I love myself”

Chad reposted

Apparently GitHub uses Tailscale somewhat

Tailscale@tailscale.com

Tailscale at GitHub scale looks like 100+ Kubernetes clusters, 115K+ new devices a month, and more than a billion provisioning requests monthly. GitHub Security Engineer Bogdan Tanasie shows how they built for it at TailscaleUp 2026 👉 www.youtube.com/watch?v=boiZ...

Impressive if you've never heard of the #BEAM celld ⚔️ BEAM * 8GB machine = ~1000 actors vs *millions* * external inspection vs live REPL * HTTP Peer traffic vs native language * basic vs first class supervision * 2026 beta vs ~1990 beta etc blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-c...

Chad reposted

According to MIT News, Margaret Hamilton died at the age of 90. "A profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program". This famous photo 🔽 inspired the For All Mankind character Margo Madison.

bryan newbold@bnewbold.net

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

Having a strong opinion rn: host mounted code sandboxes are asking for trouble. I'm abandoning that feature on AgentIncus since I already have a path to get all of my tools I want into the sandbox: nvim, lazygit, etc. Eliminates a lot of work-arounds w/r/t setuid, accommodating docker (wants root)..

Good idea.

Mike Dalessio@flavorjon.es

Hey, Rails peeps. Hot Cell is a suite of gems that helps you secure Active Storage against image library zero-days. I just released v1.0! mike.daless.io/posts/2026/1... Links to Rails World video and slides as well as the project repo and docs are in the post.

Ligaments are kind of the cabbage inside the animal. I bet ligament coleslaw would not be popular though.

Whatever benefit types confer to agents they are negated by the verbosity of TS. Holy hell.

Fascinating - TIL!

Prasad Jallepalli, MD, PhD@prasad.bsky.social

a very effective presentation of androgen insensitivity (& indirectly, non-cell-autonomy, a core principle in development & evolution of multicellularity) in many situations, the cells in your body get external signals that tell them who they are & what they do, rather than knowing it internally

Chad reposted

We've come a long way over the last few months. Today we're offically launching Tailscale PAM (beta). I'm super happy with this beautiful integration, amazing team work! 🧡

Tailscale@tailscale.com

Border0 + Tailscale is now Tailscale PAM. Now in beta, Tailscale PAM gives teams one place to manage connectivity and privileged access to databases, servers, Kubernetes clusters, and internal apps. See what’s changing → buff.ly/Ik2YZPG

Something I recently suggested to a client who was looking for ways to ease team AI fatigue: Trad Day Reserve at least day a week to write everything by hand - add tackle technical debt for extra therapy Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

And I can't get the image of Aperture Science, Inc. out of my head - I expect by design with these nerds.

Been enjoying dbt - I chose it for a client project that required ongoing analytics work. It gave us a nice balance of features w/out having to rewrite our brains to a totally new paradigm: a light DSL over SQL with composable primitives, build time data validation, and a lot more. www.getdbt.com

getdbt.comDeliver trusted data with dbt | dbt Labsdbt Labs empowers data teams to build reliable, governed data pipelines—accelerating analytics and AI initiatives with speed and confidence.

Chad reposted

I'm looking for more Elixir consulting work, so I built a low-risk offer to reach new faces. Two weeks. One problem. $6,000 (discounted). One nagging thing: flaky tests, a stalled upgrade, a Sentry backlog. Know a team it'd suit? A share or intro would mean a lot. 🙏 #ElixirLang

mikezornek.comElixir ConsultingElixir and Phoenix consulting. Fixed-price two-week sprints at $6,000, or ongoing hourly work, for teams that need upgrades, stability, and senior review.

Over the past couple of years, I noticed a lot of devs (myself included) were pretty fuzzy about what people mean by "sandboxes" for agents and dev spaces. Recently, I had the idea to turn some of that research into a website for fun if not profit: sandboxicon.com

sandboxicon.comsandboxicon.com, shared kernel, or its own?A field guide to container and VM isolation, and what your AI coding agent actually runs with by default. Every claim is labeled by how well it's sourced.

Probably should have added: vendors / projects use that term "sandbox" pretty loosely - somtimes it's a vm, sometimes it's an OCI container, sometimes it's container-ish. Which is why I started down the path of deep research on the topic.

Wat

David Bernheisel@david.bernheisel.com

oh hey, I wrote an NES emulator in Elixir 60fps (on my machine) with sound. This is Castlevania 3 which might be the toughest one to emulate. github.com/dbernheisel/... #ElixirLang

Bumped into BEAR INFO up in the Muir Wilderness area this week😂 "If you see a bear, chase it like you are trying to catch it and eat it, Get mad. Be mean. They will run away in terror - Charlotte Lake Ranger" RIDE IT LIKE A WILD STALION. DRIVE IT INSANE BY INSCESSANTLY TALKING ABOUT THE WORLD CUP

Whether it's AI use, politics, or business - the opinions of people in the arena will always carry more weight for me than those on the sidelines.

Chad reposted

🚀 Dear Elixir developers! 💜 Please help test Mishka Chelekom Headless Components! Your feedback will help us find bugs and get ready for release. 🐛✨ Our biggest release yet is almost here, with even more features on the way! 🎉🔥 Thanks for your support! 🙌 #ElixirLang