Activity for justin.abrah.ms

For the Berlin-local people @localfirstconf.com .. where do y'all hang out in Berlin? I'm unfortunately not there, but would love to generally hang out with local-oriented tech folks.

Earlier today I sat down and wondered what it would look like to have an LLM reorder a code review for comprehension. This was the result. I’d love to hear your take. ncr, narrative code review. github.com/justinabrahm...

This is my talk for PlatformCon 2026 about how I wrote a k8s platform at Thrive Market, how it deviated from plan, and how I had feelings about it. Nothing ground breaking, just an in-the-trenches reality report with some reflection www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmb6...

My experience w German bureaucracy is signing up for an appointment online, being told to be there at 9:37. Show up w a file folder of documents. There’s a sign w my appointment number and the room I should go to. Sign 2 things. Answer a couple of questions. Out by 9:43. America would be so lucky.

Moving to Berlin, I expected to hear non-English languages in the office. I was not prepared for how little of it would be in German.

London feels like what a city would look like if the builders could only use alleyways.

First talk at Leaddev was A+. This is the engineering leadership equivalent of PyCon (in the best possible interpretation of that statement).

Conference swag idea: board books. Narrow audience, but if your kid imprints on it.. you’re going to read it many dozens of times. Not sure if it will be positive association or “if I have to read this name one more time..” 😅

I needed to author some simple code yesterday without an LLM. It’s been ~1.5 years probably since I’ve seriously written code by hand. 1. I had an initial spike of fear that maybe I had forgotten (I hadn’t) 2. I didn’t have an editor downloaded/installed (just used vi) 🤔

Moving to Germany, we've had to change the way we eat. It was hard, so I uploaded the German health guidelines into a claude project and had it plan meals for us. It's been mostly good. These are those recipes (with updates from having tasted them). recipes.abrah.ms

Grass and train tracks and dandelions. Solarpunk as fuck and I love it.

German cellphone plan was €10/mo for 20gb of 5g speeds. Bananas.

In Berlin, we walked 2 blocks and passed 4 actually good playgrounds. This is a paradise for kids. Little hard on parents trying to get somewhere. I’ll take it.

Just walked into a U-bahn and the smell gave me strong sense-memories of the NYC subway. Must be the lubricants or leaking fluids or something? 👃😍

Kid (6) just woke me up at 6:30am on a Saturday.. fully awake.. asking for a sister. 🫠

At medium-sized companies, the scaling wins are almost embarrassingly available. Nobody's picked the low-hanging fruit yet because nobody's had time to look. I wrote about my experience with a Java search service before Black Friday & getting it to 3x peak traffic. justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-03...

I prefer CLIs over MCPs almost unanimously due to context management. I wrote about it here: justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-03...

Hello from @eurosky.social! I'll be in Berlin in 16 days and this feels, in many ways, like the start of something beautiful.

The thing I'm most excited about w/ all of these agents running around is the hope that we'll get ergonomic solutions to delegated identity and tight permission scopes for access control.

Wrote up the full story of how we went from 150 flaky tests to 2 at Thrive Market.. and what happened when we deleted them (nothing broke).