CatOps

Here's a story from a colleague of mine about RDS connection pooling and our endeavors with it. Connection pooling. A long journey.. The main takeaway is that the RDS Proxy is nice and managed, but not a silver bullet suitable for all the cases. Similarly, pgbouncer is old and boring, but it gets the job done. #aws #rds #databases

I am back. 🙃 Also, today is Monday, which means it's time for a fundraiser. We continue helping to raise funds for 3 laptops for the Air Defense unit (1st Corps of Azov). You can donate to this Monobank Jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4Xqw8mdW2W #donations #Ukraine

So, you must patch everything! - Browsers & OS ( to remove intermediate-CA with private key "4" ) - PHP and PHP apps - Gitlab - LiteLLM

​​Everyone who successfully in rush patched PHP, well, folks, I'm feel sorry for you

For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to highlight a fundraiser for 3 laptops for the Air Defense unit (1st Corps of Azov). Strictly saying, that's a way to have heat, light, and gas, not only inside ourself, but in our houses too. So, please don't hesitate to donate: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4Xqw8mdW2W #donations #Ukraine

Are you sure that it is a vacation, and not just location/activity change? Why I still see you checking CVEs at vacation? Go outside, idk, read book not emails and reddit 😜 Btw, happy Friade, everyone!

While I’m still enjoying my vacation, this CVE is too interesting to pass by. PwnEscape: Guest-to-Host KVM Escape (CVE-2026-99999). First of all, it has a neat number, but it is also has 9.3 severity score. This CVE describes how the IPv4 checksum check mechanism in Linux can be used to gain access to the host machine from a sandbox or a virtual machine. The former article explains how this CVE was identified. And yes, it was found with help of AI, and apparently it dates back to the 2.x kernel versions. Modern kernels such as 6.x and 7.x are affected as well, although there are already security patches available. Patch your stuff, especially if you’re providing resources for untrusted guests. #security

I’m going on a vacation, which means that I likely won’t post at all or post something very occasionally for the next 2 weeks. Here are 2 AI-related book bundles on Humble Bundle, so I don’t just leave an informational message here. - AI in Production by Manning - only 4 days left. - GenAI and Agentic AI by BPB - 20 days left. See you in the end of October!

A colleague of mine wrote an article about data migrations. Handling data migrations without anyone noticing. This one specifically is about a data migration that took several days and involved some external systems. Hopefully, these learnings will help you to design similar migrations at your place! #data #programming

​​I traded my personal information for this report, so you don’t have to! DataDog presents to you the State of AI Engineering There are some not so surprising findings, but also some less obvious things. #ai #report

A Cybersecurity books bundle by O’Reilly on Humble Bundle. The bundle is fresh and is still active for 32 more days! #books

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to remind you about a fundraiser for a pickup truck for the Zaporizhzhia direction. You can donate on this Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8Mjotj4Uei #donations #Ukraine

Here’s Datadog’s take on the increased load on CI. In this article they explain how their gitretriever service works, and how it decreases the times and compute resources it takes to run thousands of builds. #cicd

A new chapter of the CatOps Digest is here! https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2026-09-25 #digest #newsletter

Shopify wrote an article on them moving from React Native to the native code for their mobile apps. They were already ridiculed for this on Reddit for the lack of in-house knowledge of the native languages. However, I think this is a great precedent for AI. Apparently, if you know the end goal and you have enough of guardrails, you can do that. The argument that AI won't be able to debug something in the future is as applicable to humans as to AI. At the same time, Shopify's CEO calls out that people are throwing "slop grenades" at each other. Yet, two things can be true at the same time. You can successfully use AI for major refactorings and throw "slop grenades" in the form of useless documents. #ai #programming

A bunch of practice exams on Humble Bundle, if you're into this type of thing. This offer ends in less than 2 days, so make up your mind quickly. #courses

​​A good friend of the channel raises funds for his new unit (a small air defense unit). They are raising funds for tools and materials for their positions. You can donate to this Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4SB2PtGPzV #donations #Ukraine

There will be no digest today because I haven't posted much this week. So, instead here is an article from Anthropic on how to deal with the strain that AI development and reviews put on CI. This is a real problem in the AI-driven SDLC, or so-called "software factories", but unlike code reviews and harnesses, it's not been talked about so much, unfortunately. #cicd #ai

Why Distributed Databases Fail at Coordination Boundaries is a neat article on the areas to pay attention to when working with any distributed system, really. #db