CatOps

​University of Colorado published an article about a study of 7700 employees that shows that Remote workers report the highest well-being. The study simply analyzed the self-reported data without any judgments on why exactly this is the case, but one of the authors points out that: The study did not explore why remote workers reported higher well-being, but Johnson points to a growing body of research on autonomy and flexibility. One explanation is that remote workers have greater control over their work setup and daily schedule, she said. "If you have control over your environment, you tend to have more positive outcomes," she said. Working from home can also eliminate many everyday stressors. "Spending a lot of time in traffic is negatively related to well-being," Johnson said. "There are so many little stressors associated with being in the office." Those stressors can include arranging child care, hiring help for pets or managing the logistics of getting to and from work, she said. Johnson said the study points to a broader lesson for employers navigating return-to-office debates. Rather than focusing only on where employees work, organizations may get better results by investing in employee well-being. I know that this has nothing to do with the immediate topic of systems / platform / reliability engineering, but I still find this article amusing, since we all are doing our jobs in one way or another: in an office or remotely. Now, you also have a study to point to, if anyone brings up the topic of the remote work and well-being. However, it's important to keep in mind that the employee well-being is not necessary the metric that is being optimized when the RTO directives are issued. #culture

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here! https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2026-08-22 #newsletter #digest

​​Happy Independence Day of Ukraine! 💛💙 It always starts with small steps, but every step counts. So today, I'd like to get back to small fundraisers that also matter! Here, a friend of mine is raising funds for a pickup track for the Zaporizhzhia direction. You can find more info in this Instagram post (in Ukrainian). You can donate to this Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8Mjotj4Uei #donations #Ukraine

A great article about Postgres' MVCC, or rather, issues with MVCC and the ways other engines tried to mitigate those. It has a neat comparison of the tradeoffs, strong and weak parts of different implementations. It also provides insights into how different DB engines work. A quote: ... if someone tells you a database has solved multi-versioning, ask them the four questions: where do old versions live, which way do chains point, what do indexes point at, and who cleans up. Then ask what happens when a transaction stays open over lunch. #postgres #databases

Cloudflare shares a story of how they automated GitHub issues triage with AI for their Astro project. It neatly shows the evolution from a collection of skills to a semi(?) autonomous state machine that has taken the project to zero open issues. They also share the workflows they use publicly, but in my opinion the more valuable lesson here is the step-by-step model of how they got there. #ai #open_source

I've written an article about load testing of Apollo Router - a GraphQL API gateway. It's mostly pictures, so it should be easy to follow :) #graphql #load_test

​​For today's Donations Monday, I'd like to remind you about a fundraiser by a friend of mine. Its goal is to get 70k UAH for a pick up truck. So far, about 20k has been raised. Let's make it happen! https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8Mjotj4Uei #donations #Ukraine

I already shared postmortems from both OpenAI and Hugging Face on the recent security incident when a frontier model broke out of its sandbox to search for a solution for its task. Here is a more detailed writeup by OpenAI on this incident. Given that OpenAI has an intrinsic motivation to advertise their models, I would still take this with a pinch of salt, but it should be interesting. I haven't read this article fully yet, but the start is promising. #ai #security

Continuing with the topic of AI. A colleague of mine wrote an article on how to attribute the cost with AWS Bedrock with code samples of how to enable it and the description of pitfalls we encountered along the way. #aws #ai #finops

A nice visualization of Go dependencies. It's interesting how you can instantly see packages that support hundreds, if not thousands, of others. I would have guessed that testify is popular, but I wouldn't have guessed that it's the most popular. Also, I did not expect to see Viper and Cobra being so influential, even though I think they are cool. #go #programming

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here! https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2026-09-04 #digest #newsletter

​​Today, I’d like to remind you about the fundraiser a friend of mine is doing. The goal is to raise 70k UAH for a pickup truck for Zaporizhzhia direction. You can donate on this Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8Mjotj4Uei #donations #Ukraine

An interesting article on how to configure AI reviews for Terraform plans with GitHub Actions and AWS Bedrock. I don’t necessarily like the style of this article, but the content is cool. Now, I need to check how to do something similar with Atlantis. I presume, I could just trigger a GHA on a comment. P.S. This article was brought to you by weekly.tf. If you actively work with Terraform, you may find this newsletter helpful. So, make sure to subscribe! #terraform #ai

I recall, back in the day, there was a popular interview question: "What would you not automate in your job?" I haven't heard it for a while, but with AI now, maybe it's still relevant. Perhaps it's even more relevant than back then. What SREs Should Automate — and Never Automate — with AI is an article about that. I would argue that the point about security incidents contradicts a bit to what was said earlier: if AI can collect the data for a normal incident, why cannot it do the same for the security one? A human would still stay in charge of the remediation and the final decision. #sre #ai

I don’t remember, if I shared this book bundle with you, but it won’t hurt to share it again. Think like a programmer by No Starch Press. #books

Why Distributed Databases Fail at Coordination Boundaries is a neat article on the areas to pay attention to when working with any distributed system, really. #db

There will be no digest today because I haven't posted much this week. So, instead here is an article from Anthropic on how to deal with the strain that AI development and reviews put on CI. This is a real problem in the AI-driven SDLC, or so-called "software factories", but unlike code reviews and harnesses, it's not been talked about so much, unfortunately. #cicd #ai

​​A good friend of the channel raises funds for his new unit (a small air defense unit). They are raising funds for tools and materials for their positions. You can donate to this Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4SB2PtGPzV #donations #Ukraine

A bunch of practice exams on Humble Bundle, if you're into this type of thing. This offer ends in less than 2 days, so make up your mind quickly. #courses

Shopify wrote an article on them moving from React Native to the native code for their mobile apps. They were already ridiculed for this on Reddit for the lack of in-house knowledge of the native languages. However, I think this is a great precedent for AI. Apparently, if you know the end goal and you have enough of guardrails, you can do that. The argument that AI won't be able to debug something in the future is as applicable to humans as to AI. At the same time, Shopify's CEO calls out that people are throwing "slop grenades" at each other. Yet, two things can be true at the same time. You can successfully use AI for major refactorings and throw "slop grenades" in the form of useless documents. #ai #programming

A new chapter of the CatOps Digest is here! https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2026-09-25 #digest #newsletter

Here’s Datadog’s take on the increased load on CI. In this article they explain how their gitretriever service works, and how it decreases the times and compute resources it takes to run thousands of builds. #cicd

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to remind you about a fundraiser for a pickup truck for the Zaporizhzhia direction. You can donate on this Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8Mjotj4Uei #donations #Ukraine

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