Lee Skillen

Founder and CTO at @cloudsmith. Proud girl Dad to two gamer girls. Opinions = mine. Empathy first. Founder at Newzbin (V1). We made NZBs.

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Software is now easier to create than to trust.

That is a big part of why today matters.

Cloudsmith just announced a $72M Series C. The truth is that artifact management was never just passive storage or just a repo. It was always the control point.

AI and software assembly have made that much more obvious.

We’re building the operating system for the software supply chain.

https://t.co/x8seMCJ0Fu

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

From the replies (thank you!). A lot more options, these mentioned so far:

- Synk
- Datadog
- Aikido
- GitHub Advanced Security
- GitLab
- DependencyTrack
- Mend
- Safe Depo
- Cloudsmith
- Google OSV

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

The 3Rs of Critical Infrastructure: Responsibility, Resilience, and Reality:
https://t.co/uLtihvA3ee

It was difficult to resist sneaking a link to @QuinnyPig's sentiment that multi-cloud is mostly an act of wasting time and money.

I doubt that stance has changed, but we agree!

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

There are three certainties in life:
death, taxes, and outages.

Blame isn't.

The October 20th outage in us-east-1 was a timely reminder of the role we play in critical infrastructure.

I wrote up the deep dive from the @cloudsmith side, and it lines up with @GergelyOrosz’s take:

1. Take responsibility.
2. Build for failure.
3. Don't punch down.

Link in first comment.

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

MAGIC PEOPLE VOO

"Imagine being able to build an app, at the touch of a button, introducing the next-generation natural language interface, Base44, to make your dream a ..."

DOO PEOPLE

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Introducing, Not the Tao of Cloudsmith:
https://t.co/GeZpTBiaG6

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Not the original Tao of Cloudsmith. Not a new one either. Just 15 principles shaped by time, mistakes, and building Cloudsmith over 9 years. What still matters when building infra, teams, and culture in 2025. 👇

[Docker @Docker]

Docker Hardened Images are raising the bar: ultra-minimal, near-zero-CVE, and now available with #CloudSmith

“We’re proud to partner with Docker… giving developers full traceability and continuous security from source to production.” — @lskillen @Cloudsmith CTO

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

@dstufft @cloudsmith could be interesting 🤔

(assuming that you aren't trying to actively get away from artifact management, that is! 😆)

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

@twentworth12 @cloudsmith My immediate thought was "But, paying them, or sending them?" and then it hit me, must be a football thing. 😆 Now I'm wondering if she's _actually_ a fan, or if this is a friendly joshing thing. 😁

P.s. Congrats on the Series B, Tom!

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Check out my latest article: The Commodore 64 probably saved my life. https://t.co/7YwlkFgXgV via @LinkedIn

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Full post here w/ talks, takeaways, and themes from the week: https://t.co/aIaljCWt91

Massive thanks to everyone we met, debated with, or danced beside. This community’s something special.

Atlanta next? :)

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

KubeCon London 2025? After note-wrangling + caffeine, we whipped up our engineering recap; no fluff, no pitch. TL;DR:

-> Wasm’s growing up
-> OPA doing FinOps (!?)
-> Everyone’s signing everything
-> Observability wants a language
-> Artifact mgmt is leveling up

👇

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

@icelynjennings @imduffy15 @cloudsmith It was great chatting with you, Icelyn! Glad you enjoyed it. ^_^

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Check out my latest article: Cloudsmith: Series B [TCV, Insight Partners] https://t.co/NDOq14X9jW via @LinkedIn

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Today's involved robots pushing boxes around a warehouse. I decided to add depth-based lighting to the visualization for entertainment purposes (note: any visualizations are optional; if you think this is good, you should see some of the mind-bending visualizations people do on Reddit).

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

In my previous post on LinkedIn [1], I sent a ho-ho-hopeful plea that you would join me in playing Advent of Code this year. So, how's it going? We're more than halfway through, and at this point, the going usually gets a bit tougher.

Given the commitment, it's not uncommon to see people drop off, but there will always be time after the holidays. The tricky bit is getting the puzzles completed in a reasonable time from this day forward.

As I previously mentioned, my weapon of choice is Python (using my toolkit [2]), which some may find unusual since I tell them I also play competitively on *execution time* (I don't try for leaderboards).

Usually, if I ask, "How do I make this faster?" the first answer is, "Don't use Python." 😂 But I love Python. I love the Zen of Python. Cloudsmith is almost entirely written in Python. It can be fast, but you have to work for it.

Inspired by @dps's previous blog post about completing Advent of Code 2023 in less than one second [2], I also wanted to continue the trend. With some not-so-mild sweating, I'm doing OK so far (see image). *

There have been many grid-related problems this year, and my new joke is that there are actually *three* problems in computer science: naming things, caching things, off-by-one errors, and more grids.

So, what's your favorite puzzle so far if you're playing? I immensely enjoyed Day 9 and Day 13. Day 9 because it was nostalgic writing a mini disk defragmenter (ah, the olden days!) Day 13 = Linear Algebra saves the day.

* Timings executed over 20 runs (pypy JIT optimizes); cold time = 487ms. 😅Interestingly, this is still significantly faster than CPython 3.13, which executes in 535ms and doesn't do JIT optimization, so it's consistently around that.

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

[1] https://t.co/gmZsBGSRJT
[2] https://t.co/v8AX9ahf14
[3] https://t.co/qR72TMCJ7V

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Happy birthday, Dad. Missing you always. 🕯️

Reminder to everyone: Always Hug Your People as if it might be the last time you see them. Because one of the times that you do, it really will be. Life is too short. 💔

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

Link: https://t.co/v8AX9ahf14

[Lee Skillen @lskillen]

If you're looking for a starter kit to get you going with solving #AdventOfCode using Python and modern tooling (uv+mypy+ruff+devcontainer, etc.). Link down below: 👇