Married to @OtherGill, father of 2 awesome Girls, Cloud Architect, Wardley Mapper. focused on Engineering excellence, Well Architected, Serverless first.

Belfast
Joined February 2009
Mark McCann retweeted
A visible sign of what AI insiders have been warning about since at least the Mythos release. Acceleration of attack and defense, at inhuman speeds, interacting with the very human systems that need to react to them.
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
133
177
19
1,911
136,696
Regularly when I share concerns raised with me by healthcare professionals about the upcoming winter pressures I get replies like ‘it happens every year’ or ‘it’s always like this’. See the chart below of 12 hour waits in A&Es since 2008. It is much, much worse now.
9
23
1
41
1,937
Mark McCann retweeted
A consequential choice will be made soon by government and companies as they are increasingly flooded with agentic AI inquiries that overcome the frictions that gated access (see the graphs - it has already started!) Two options: do you make services worse or better as a result?
272
180
73
1,375
161,742
Mark McCann retweeted
I cannot recall any other time in the tech industry when the COMPLETE industry (from small to large companies; nonprofits to VC-funded; private sector to government and academia) is trying to figure out how to change the dev tools and processes we use. all AT THE SAME TIME!!
110
46
10
1,176
55,104
AI is making code cheaper to produce. But is it making software better? The real bottleneck is shifting from writing code to making good decisions. David Anderson explores why context, architecture and engineering judgement matter more than ever. 👉 theserverlessedge.com/softwa… #SoftwareEngineering #AI
1
1
1
81
Mark McCann retweeted
After such a long wait, SpimeScript finally starts to emerge ->
After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.
1
3
1
16
2,209
Gemini 4 Argon taught a robot to play cornhole just by watching a video. It mapped the physics, coded its own simulation, and taught @Apptronik's Apollo humanoid to sink 7 throws in a row.
285
409
215
3,423
270,370
Mark McCann retweeted
YES! It's out it's out, I am SO excited for this! #AWSLambda Web Functions are a game changer! A true HTTP request handler and Each execution environment handles multiple requests simultaneously (up to 128 concurrent requests per environment). Multi-region deploy, and so much more! -> aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ann…
27
66
26
480
179,894
When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. A lot of people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations. Because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from – if they disappeared when Yandex went offline. This proves, again and again, that Europe is not the source of the problems. Europe is not the one making everything more difficult. Most importantly, we need people in America, every morning, when the day in Europe is already moving toward evening, to really see what is happening. To see the truth. From a speech at the Warsaw Security Forum. (3/3)
2,443
21,009
1,269
103,036
2,564,674
Mark McCann retweeted
Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is like saying photography is dead now that everyone in the world has a camera in their pocket Not only is it not dead it's the beginning of the Kodak Brownie moment for software, and we will see an absolute explosion of it It will be the first generation for who building software will feel no different than using it. This is crazy! The quality and bar of what we expect from our everyday apps will be raised dramatically, we'll have personal software, we'll have disposable software, and agents will be the foundation for most of it Tech has always been chaotic and evolving, the people who have been able to adapt and move in front of new opportunities have always excelled, this is nothing new, I'm seeing it now and we'll see it 10 years from now Find the opportunities in the chaose and disruption, there are countless of them
235
368
101
3,326
309,617
Russians have been doing this for years. And including in 2016. We have ignored a gigantic elephant in the room for too long. Tories because they did not want full Johnson charlatanism exposed. Farage lot because they have been in bed with Russia for yonks. Labour because of the fantasy of “making Brexit work.” Burnham has done a huge service in letting the truth in to disinfect
Apparently Russian servers have been hit by a Ukrainian strike and immediately massive online hard right chatter has collapsed. This particular chatter was in support of Germany’s AFD, their equivalent to Reform, but similar patterns are being seen in hard right movements everywhere, including the UK. If anyone needed anymore evidence that Russia are driving a massive wave of hard right propaganda in Europe, this is it. So, all you “patriots” - you’ve been duped by Russia, and you are about as far from patriotic as anyone can be. You are easily brainwashed though. This is how propaganda works.
1,302
1,581
102
7,331
300,908
We knew in the 1980s that measuring developers by lines of code was a bad idea. Now AI can generate code at extraordinary speed — so measuring output makes even less sense. More code ≠ more value. Measure outcomes. Problems solved. User impact. Not typing speed. linkedin.com/pulse/developer… #DeveloperProductivity #SoftwareEngineering #EngineeringLeadership #AI
1
1
76
Mark McCann retweeted
I am 100x more excited about this long-missing feature than any possible AI integration Not everything that is useful and practical for users has to be AI! In fact... (I love this new change coming inside GDocs)
We are making Markdown files work natively across Google Drive and Docs. You can now preview .md files in Drive, open them in Docs, edit them, comment on them, and collaborate without converting the file into a Google Doc!
55
39
3
1,474
123,111
Mark McCann retweeted
We are making Markdown files work natively across Google Drive and Docs. You can now preview .md files in Drive, open them in Docs, edit them, comment on them, and collaborate without converting the file into a Google Doc!
939
1,350
950
21,058
1,435,998
Mark McCann retweeted
How the Republic’s budget process looks when you’ve been reporting on Stormont.
10
31
3
304
17,230
Mark McCann retweeted
A whole bunch of Amazonians doing victory laps over this as if they want praise for ignoring this explicit customer request, from basically everyone, for over twenty years. Congrats on doing the bare minimum? It only took AGI to do it?
AWS just got a lot easier to use.
17
7
136
16,205
Mark McCann retweeted
I just vibe-coded a B2B SaaS instead of buying it, because the salesperson insisted on a meeting before sending me the price. Have seen @levelsio write about this and now I experienced it myself. A salesperson reached out to me on LinkedIn about a platform that uses Apple + Google Wallet to boost webinar show-up rates. Super smart. We have 20,000 webinar attendees a year at Obsidian, so I wanted to buy it. I asked for the price. The answer: the fastest way to get one was to book a meeting. I replied "I don't do calls" and asked them to just send the price so I could buy. They totally understood, but I still needed a meeting. So I asked AI to build it into Obsidian's own marketing system (also made by AI and replaced our 4k EUR monthly monday dot com subscription). About an hour later, I had a working prototype in Google Wallet. Apple Wallet is ready too, just waiting on 1–3 days of verification. Price of their software: no idea, but I would have bought it for $100 monthly immediately if I could. Price of ours: 1 hour with AI while watching Toy Story 5 with the kids, plus $99 a year for an Apple Developer account. Google was free. Always envied people who sell b2b saas, but not right now.
41
10
12
400
145,803
Mark McCann retweeted
Hot damn.... it is even more incredible watching sped up. Look at the lighting through that whole sequence as the next Starlink follows it out. Unbelievable! 🤯🤯🤯
48
241
16
3,901
172,589
Flying flags on lampposts is “illegal”. Issues around bonfires are “illegal”. There are lots of things going on around the north/Northern Ireland that are without permission/unlawful. Law routinely flouted by all backgrounds.
128
7
761
21,204
Mark McCann retweeted
Today is our 31st wedding anniversary and looking at the headlines, we could be back in the 1990s. It's all so utterly, utterly unnecessary and predictable. My thoughts are with the @PoliceServiceNI who are yet again placed in an impossible position and with their families.
285
15
22
338
126,798