Some stuff I thought was particularly interesting from the past week:

  1. How Git is served at scale: one of my company’s core offerings is a Git forge. Most of my time has been spent working on other things, but I’ve been pulled into random awkward nooks and crannies of being a Git provider; LFS clients are a particularly full can of worms. But working at a place without GitHub’s scale, I’ve never had to learn how they handled horizontal scale – we still get away with NFS. While this knowledge isn’t directly applicable yet, I greatly enjoyed reading Vincent Martí’s writeup at https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale . It was clear the author had both a deep understanding of and great respect for the engineering that had allowed GitHub to scale. He did an elegant job of explaining the many issues and problems that led Cursor to build a new system for an agentic-development world without casting aspersions on the work done by the GH engineers.
  2. The story of Robert the Bruce, or at least where his name came from: I’m currently listening to Tom Coyne’s “A Course Called Scotland” in semi-prep for a Scottish golf trip I’m dreaming about. He’s currently at Turnberry, which is apparently the birthplace of Robert. I Wikipedia’ed him because my dad’s name is Bruce. Robert’s Bruce apparently came from “de Bruys”, indicating French roots back in Brus. Also that he was the one who pulled Scottish independence away from the English back in the 1300s, which is cool too.
  3. About the AWS AgentCore architecture: we’re planning to use it for a project at work. At a high level it basically seems like a convenient way to programmatically spin up temporary EC2 instances with some built-in instance isolation and MCP bells and whistles. As I try to do more and more coding via Claude Code Web (so I don’t have to keep my MacBook running to code), it strikes me how closely it’s UX matches the architecture of AgentCore: Claude Code Web will prompt you for MCP access, use a few built-in tools, and even show in the UI that an instance is “shutting down” or “spinning up”. Very much seems like they “just” slapped the Claude Code SDK in an AgentCore box and hooked your browser up to that, which is neat.
  4. Yet again affirmed my affinity for monorepos and consistent build/test/deploy systems: I was working with a long-time coworker to index our current repos and mechanisms for getting code from them into production. We’ve both been at our job for 4+ years, and I think to us these repos have accumulated very slowly with very reasonable, pragmatic decisions made at points in time to add a new repo and/or deploy mechanism. But cumulatively 3-4 hours later we were left with a list of 20 repos with probably 12 different deployment stories. It left me realizing how hard it would be to come into a company like ours and try to be productive early on.