Scenes of unparalleled digital jubilation erupted in the #thanks channel this past Thursday when Scott Olechowski, Chief Product Officer of Plex, published what can only be described as the most culinarily-themed shout-out in the history of corporate gratitude. “Yo, I need to give the biggest, most BUSSIN shout-out to Enzo Maruffa,” the missive began, and from thence it only escalated.
The tribute, composed in a style that Mr. Olechowski himself might describe as “straight fire,” praised Maruffa’s tireless work transforming Bott Weston from “a few raw ingredients” into “a full-blown Michelin-star operation” — an AI data oracle now answering BigQuery questions, pulling ad revenue figures, and searching the company wiki with the erudition of a Victorian encyclopaedia.
The reaction tally beggars belief: 31 “enzos-vibe-coding-again” emotes, 22 “enzo-galaxy-brain,” 21 “enzo-turtle-feels-good,” and 17 plex-hearts. Jamaal Bacchus piled on, noting Maruffa has been “tremendously helpful” and “truly one of a kind.”
But it was Marshall Asch who delivered the coup de grâce, observing dryly: “This looks a lot like the kind of writing Bott Weston / The Cook use… it makes me suspicious that Enzo has succeeded in his goal of replacing one more person with a bot.” Four “joy” reactions confirmed the assembled citizenry’s amusement.
Enzo Maruffa, whose energy this paper suspects may derive from sources yet unknown to modern science, announced on the evening of March 30th that Bott Weston — Plex’s data-querying AI oracle — is now available as an MCP server, connectable to Claude Code, Claude Desktop (Cowork), Cursor, and any other instrument of the AI persuasion.
Three “flavours” are on offer: a docs endpoint for the full agentic workflow, a tools endpoint for direct tool access, and a coding endpoint for the brave souls wishing to open pull requests via artificial intelligence.
Scott Olechowski was among the first to test the contraption, proclaiming: “Having had a chance to play with it a bit — using this with Claude is The Future. Amazing work!!!!” John Revels declared it “gonna be rad,” whilst João Silva swiftly provided configuration tips for the assembled engineers.
Maruffa, ever the cautious scientist, appended a warning: “Remember that LLMs are incredibly good lying machines. Always check stuff.”
“Honestly so cool to see it come together. I remember talking to Ricardo about building our own messaging service back in the fall and thinking this is crazy…we can’t do this in this timeline? And he said you’d be surprised at how fast we can move.” — Jamaal Bacchus, on Paperboi
A wave of melancholy swept through the corridors of the Plex Slack workspace on Thursday morning when Adam Livesley, a gentleman of nearly ten years’ faithful service, announced his departure. “I did not think I would ever be typing this,” he wrote, “but after almost 10 years at Plex, it’s time for me to move on.” His last day shall be Friday, the 1st of May.
The outpouring was immediate and voluminous. Alex Stevenson-Price, visibly moved, noted with alarm: “I can’t believe we’re down to like… 3 brits now?! This is a travesty!” Muhammad Arafat recalled that Livesley was his “main point of contact” eight years ago, praising his “extensive knowledge and outstanding competence, all while being the most humble and kind.”
Mohammed Moussa lamented: “I will miss our Plexcon chats,” whilst Corrine fondly recalled being on the same team in Greece. The announcement garnered 54 plex-hearts and 34 sad-pandas — a reaction count that speaks volumes of the esteem in which Livesley is held.
SERVING DAILY:
Bott Weston queries,
Paperboi data pipelines,
The Cook, and approximately
47 other things.
NOW WITH MCP!
THREE FLAVOURS:
DOCS • TOOLS • CODING
Warning: Chef may have
replaced the shout-out writer
with a bot. Unconfirmed.
Are FRAUDULENT candidates
clogging your hiring pipeline?
Is AI writing résumés better
than the candidates themselves?
SCOTT WESTON’S
AI-POWERED SOLUTION
33 plex-hearts. 26 scotty-datas.
5 stars from Christa Foley.
Pricey 3rd-party tools: weeping.
Marcelo Almeida, a gentleman of considerable ambition and no small talent with Claude tokens, announced via #engineering-announcements that the new admin interface for MyPlex went live on April 2nd, capping a monumental rewrite of the platform’s venerable administrative apparatus.
The scope of the endeavour is staggering: 65+ controllers converted, 170+ new ERB views across 55+ admin sections, a redesigned login page, and a new sidebar navigation replacing the ancient “OTHER ADMIN STUFF” links that had haunted the bottom of every page since 2014.
The old Bootstrap 3 / jQuery / HAML stack has been replaced wholesale with Tailwind CSS v4, Turbo, Stimulus, and importmap — a modernisation made possible by the recent upgrade to Rails 8.1. The release is opt-in for now, with Almeida noting with a Dr. Evil emoji that permanence is forthcoming.
Christa Foley delivered a rousing tribute to Scott Weston for building “Herbicide” — an internal AI tool to screen résumés. With candidate volume at 2x and AI-generated applications flooding in, Weston’s solution arrived “like a gift from the heavens,” saving Plex from pricey third-party alternatives. 33 plex-hearts.
The Paperboi saga, first reported in these pages last week, continues to unfold with the steady confidence of a well-oiled industrial machine. Greta Schlender’s triumphant announcement on March 30th — “PAPERBOI V0 IS LIVE — AND WE’RE GOING FULL SEND!!!” — remains the single most reacted-to post of the fortnight, with 39 plex-hearts, 14 plexy-dances, and 11 paperboi emotes adorning the message like medals upon a general’s breast.
The roll-call of heroes is long and distinguished: Andrada Bosinceanu as fearless EM lead, Nicholas Randhawa as the engine behind the provider, Vince Antov as an “unstoppable train,” Enzo Maruffa and Scott Weston as the data backbone (37M+ row backfill!), Jake Bodmer and scojo as the Growth/Marketing dynamic duo, Andy Cook warming IPs to 100%, Tiago Bastos and Marcelo Almeida bringing push to life, Jamaal Bacchus building Looker dashboards, and Chris Curtis pressure-testing from the user’s perspective.
This week, the team pressed onward: Nicholas Randhawa shipped UUID tracking for push notifications, whilst Ricardo Castro and Enzo Maruffa debated the finer points of data dictionaries for the segmentation tool. The Paperboi channel hums with the productive energy of a factory floor at full capacity.
Scott Olechowski, in his characteristic fashion, pronounced it “one of my favorite boondoggles ever” and “a very strategically important move to bring these capabilities in house.” Scott Weston, with typical modesty, deflected credit: “I think this gives me far too much credit. The data piece was really all the work of Enzo.”
In an irony that would have delighted Charles Dickens himself, the first day of April brought no jest but rather a genuine production incident of considerable severity. A 10% surge in Discover traffic to the GET /services/user endpoint triggered what engineers have since described as a “self-DOS feedback loop” between MyPlex and Discover.
At its nadir, only 89 of 249 desired pods remained available, as the liveness probe — sharing the same 36 application threads — caused Kubernetes to slay pods that were merely busy, not dead. Bruno Martins coordinated the response, shipping a trilogy gem revert, a subsequent update to v2.12.3, and autoscaler tuning.
Marcelo Almeida’s forensic analysis uncovered the key finding: isolating the liveness probe from the application thread pool is the principal remedy. Three Linear issues now track the path to a more resilient future.
Ty Leet shared a heartening LinkedIn message in #plex: a user praising the Plex experience in glowing terms. “Some nice feedback,” Leet noted with a blush emoji, reminding us all that beyond the incident channels and PR reviews, real humans are delighting in our product every day.
SENDS ONE MILLION
ELECTRONIC LETTERS DAILY
at velocities that would make
your postman weep!
37 MILLION ROWS
BACKFILLED
IP WARMING: 100%
Iterable not included.
Iterable not needed.
Iterable not mourned.
Is YOUR admin interface
still running Bootstrap 3?
From the year 2014??
TAILWIND CSS v4
TURBO • STIMULUS
RAILS 8.1
Opt-in today!
Click the big yellow button.
Legacy available for the timid.
Are your pods dying
of HEALTHINESS?
Is your probe competing for
the same 36 threads?
89 of 249 pods survived.
The rest were merely busy.
May they rest in autoscale.