Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

I don't like the phrase "Technical Debt". It's effectively lost all meaning.

I always need to ask, "what about it is technical debt?"

I've gotten a variety of responses:
- the abstractions are wrong
- the performance is bad
- the technology is out of date
- it's undocumented
- I don't know the tech

That last one in particular when someone told me, "It's technical debt because I don't know the tech," is when I knew the phrase had lost all meaning.

📅 Mark your calendars!
POSETTE 2026 is coming June 16–18!
POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is a virtual celebration of PostgreSQL with dozens of talks plus lots of learning and community connection.

https://posetteconf.com/2026/

#PosetteConf #postgresql #databases #OpenSource #community

Those of you who are software engineers (not software engineering managers) and have daily standups: who wants those?

A — I do.
B — I don't, but the majority of my team does.
C — Nobody in our team does, but our manager wants them.
D — Nobody wants them, not even our manager, but we must have them per organisational policy.

(Boosts for reach much appreciated.)

UK petition: " Do not introduce Digital #IDcards " - https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194 currently close to 1.65 million signatures; let's get it to 2 million today, please sign if you can... #privacy #surveillance

My view - saying the recent incidents should be a wake up call isn’t moving the needle enough in business.

So a lever is, if JLR need bailing out, put the PM on TV to announce it, explain why and the context of attacks on UK institutions, and announce paying all extortion attempts will be outlawed by the end of parliament. It would send shockwaves through business and force real resiliency planning.

The cherry on the top of this story? At the time I was *sitting in the offices of the company acting as my ID provider* trying to design user-centric products for them.

Also in the brief flicker of life of gov.uk Identify, or whatever it was called, I tried to use it to access my driving licence details and it immediately shat itself and *deleted my entire identity* because of the apostrophe in my surname.

I expect a similar quality of execution from Starmer’s Digital ID.

Starmer announcing a mandatory digital ID as though the mythical digital borders ever got built, or indeed even as though the last time GDS tried to build any kind of digital ID system, it didn’t get strangled in the crib by a different government department refusing to play along. He may as well have announced moon marshmallows.

Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.
(This is a post about Tylenol and autism. )

@ChrisMayLA6 I'm sure it won't be another post office scala saga of errors homelessness and suicides due to errors right...

Labour need to throw Starmer under the bus ASAP before they become as unelectable as the tories

Hmmm.... so Keir Starmer is looking to move to a universal digital ID... which I assume will effectively make owning a smartphone mandatory.

Not good news for smartphone refuseniks like me, but I knew I'd only be able to hold out so long.... but I've got a little time yet, and there's 'many a slip twixt cup & lip'

#DigitalID #politics #smartphone

h/t FT

@ChrisMayLA6 I really don't understand the enthusiasm for apps all the time.

They want ID cards? Simply issue a physical card like everyone else does.

For those who haven't been following JLR in detail, key chain of events:

1) JLR outsource key IT and infosec functions to TCS, approved by 1x director and 2x NEDs on both JLR and TCS boards

2) JLR transfer staff by TUPE to TCS

3) TCS lay off transferred UK staff, including cyber risk and governance and cyber monitoring

4) record profits for a decade

5) got hacked

6) company stops functioning

7) get government to bail out their key suppliers (in progress)

Apple asks the EU to repeal the Digital Markets Act (DMA) because it's like really hard for them to comply without giving up a lot of its monopoly and they keep getting caught out trying to circumvent it. The maker of Liquid Glass seem to have a liquid ass. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250925-apple-asks-eu-to-scrap-landmark-digital-competition-law

I've moved the #Rails open letter to its own GitHub org just to avoid potential backscatter abuse on my other projects. The old link will still work though.

31 signatures so far. Don't really know what to make of that 🤷

https://github.com/Plan-Vert/open-letter

This is fun… when Charlie Kirk met his match in Cambridge UK
https://youtu.be/9O7y50cNb7c

#Rails folks, here's an open letter asking the Rails Core to cut ties with DHH and hard fork Rails to a new project with proper governance.

You can sign with a pull request. Let's show that there's demand for this, and that the community won't appease racists.

https://github.com/Floppy/plan-vert-letter

(boosts and cross-posts to other places are appreciated!)

FOSDEM 2026: 31st January and 1st February https://fosdem.org/2026/news/2025-09-18-fosdem-2026/