Tech Blog of Stephen Souness

When I joined a company a few years ago there was an established part of the introduction to the wider team, where each new person had their turn to describe three interesting facts about themselves - where one of them would actually be made up. Then there would be a bit of voting to see which statement was least believable. Some of my recent experiences with AI reminded me of that "Two truths, and a lie" experience. Earlier this week I spent a couple of hours delving into what performance characteristics we should expect to get out of a particular configuration of an AWS service. The AI agent surfaced up the top handful of performance optimisation recommendations, followed up with some tables of numbers for estimated performance differences involved. Given that our use case was mainly going to involve finding matches between two data sources, I figured that there would almost certainly be further performance benefits available if we worked with sorted data. So, I gave the ag...

It wasn't totally unexpected It's Friday 13th March 2026, the news is still sinking in that I have been made redundant due to Atlassian's decision to reduce costs by cutting 1600 from the workforce. I've been telling friends and family that I'm okay and that it wasn't entirely unexpected. My teammates had been speculating and half-joking about the prospect of layoffs in the last couple of weeks, particularly as one of the developers had been unlucky enough to go through a couple of rounds of redundancies at his previous companies. Getting mixed signals Earlier in the week I had received an invitation from the talent acquisition team to participate in interviewing a candidate for a software engineering position next Tuesday, so I quietly thought, "hmm, maybe we're not in a total hiring freeze after all", and also, "oh crap, that goal related to participating in interviews is still going to be relevant this quarter so I'm gonna need to compl...

A day  morning in the life of a developer Code reviews Blocking for required changes Checked Bitbucket for fresh pull requests on my team's repositories that require approvals before they could be merged in and included in a deploy. One of the changes involved a private function for calculating some dates that included logic based on the current date. The documentation comment appeared to be incomplete so I couldn't quite tell what it was intended to do. I added a couple of comments, mainly proposing that the date calculation logic should be extracted out to its own component with a Clock being provided as a dependency so that we could cover it with tests and have control over what the value of "now" would be for the Clock component. On this particular day I made the decision to be a little bit stricter in my feedback, so I clicked the "Changes required" option meaning that I would have to come back to re-review the pull request before it could be progressed...