Big data and streaming analytics and cool software building nerd. Retweets != endorsements and opinions given are my own, even though you should agree with them
Joined March 2013
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Ed Brown retweeted
Over the past two months, we have been leading a coalition to mitigate one of the most severe bugs in open source software found in recent memory, php2shell, found as part of our Patch the Planet initiative.
Ed Brown retweeted
Anthropic engineer:
"You're not supposed to prompt Claude. You're supposed to build a system that prompts itself."
In 45 minutes, she breaks down how Anthropic builds agents that remember, learn from their mistakes, and get smarter with every run.
Worth more than any paid course you'll find on building agents.
Watch this and bookmark
Ed Brown retweeted
🚨 Anthropic just showed a 27-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.
Taught by the people who built it.
Free. No registration. No paywall.
I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.
Watch the session
Ed Brown retweeted
People now try to steamroll my parents since they're mildly elderly. So part of my daughter duties have become popping in to get folks back in line when they're pushing it a little too much lol
The role reversals in parent/child relationships continue to crack me up.
Ed Brown retweeted
I tried to use X Ads, really did
(because via the subscription I get $1,000 of ads credits p/m)
It's a product I failed to use properly, because it's just so bad, limited etc
So a tweet celebrating having a skeleton crew run a product I cannot use is not the flex it looks like
Ed Brown retweeted
Bleacher Report gave the Ravens a "D" grade for their 2026 offseason report card
"It's difficult to look at the Baltimore Ravens and say they're a better team today than they were last season"
Ed Brown retweeted
This is why I got rid of my Oura ring years ago.
I’d wake up feeling absolutely amazing and well rested. Only to check my phone and have it tell me I actually slept like crap and should take it easy today.
I then found myself not working out in case it was right.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Ed Brown retweeted
Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is "part of normal business." The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with "high blast radius" caused by "Gen-AI assisted changes" for which "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." Translation to human language: we gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking?
The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. AWS spent 13 hours recovering after its own AI coding tool, asked to make some changes, decided instead to delete and recreate the environment (the software equivalent of fixing a leaky tap by knocking down the wall). Amazon called that an "extremely limited event" (the affected tool served customers in mainland China).
Ed Brown retweeted
Exactly. This era of layoffs stem from business strategy and change management issues. We are seeing the top of the industry being laid off…
Ed Brown retweeted
Developers should focus on being end to end engineers. A software engineer either devops knowledge is unstoppable, mainly because the real work starts after you initially deploy a product. Monitoring/logging software, automating tests, understanding the infrastructure, etc.
Ed Brown retweeted
We’ve reached a new level of delusion with the Microsoft AI CEO saying all white collar labor will be replaced by AI within 18 months.
Microsoft should learn how to create a way to search for an email that actually works before claiming they’re going to automate the entire global economy.
And while they’re at it, they should come up with a way for companies to use Microsoft products without having to pay a fortune to an IT firm that employs humans to resolve the software issues that come up every hour on the hour.
Ed Brown retweeted
I’m a big believer in never saying anything in your work Slack, Teams, etc that you wouldn’t want someone else to potentially read one day.
Maybe no one will ever read it, but I’m heavy on the “better safe than sorry”.
I work at Slack.
We tell employees their DMs are private.
And they are.
Mostly.
Look, when we say "private" we mean private between you and the person you're messaging.
And your admin.
And HR.
And legal.
And whatever compliance tool your company bought.
And the export logs.
And the backup systems.
And anyone with a court order.
But other than that, totally private.
We're very clear about this in our documentation.
Page 47.
Section 12.
Subsection C.
Paragraph 8.
The part nobody reads before they trash-talk their manager at 11pm.
Here's what employees don't understand.
When you delete a message, you're just deleting it from your view.
The message still exists.
In exports.
In backups.
In the retention policy.
It's like closing your eyes and thinking you're invisible.
The data belongs to the company, not you.
We say this right in our terms.
Workspace owners control everything.
They decide how long messages are stored.
Sometimes it's 30 days.
Sometimes it's forever.
Hope you didn't say anything spicy in 2019.
Enterprise customers get extra features.
Full message exports.
Metadata tracking.
Who messaged whom.
When.
How often.
Communication patterns.
It's for "compliance."
It's for "legal needs."
It's for "regulatory requirements."
It's definitely not for micromanagement.
We're very careful to explain that admins can't see messages in real-time.
They have to formally request an export.
Fill out some forms.
Click some buttons.
Maybe wait an hour.
Very high barrier.
Almost impossible to abuse.
The key takeaway is simple.
Treat Slack like work email.
Not like WhatsApp.
Not like Signal.
Just because it looks like a chat app doesn't mean it works like one.
If a message could cause trouble when HR reads it, don't send it.
This is empowering employees with knowledge.
If you wouldn't say it in the break room with your manager behind you, don't type it in Slack.
That's privacy.
Informed privacy.
Enterprise-grade informed privacy.
Ed Brown retweeted
Just learned that some large and well-known tech companies have "storytelling" teams.
On one end: wild
On the other: given that narrative is increasingly important... maybe not so much?
