Hazel Weakly

Hey again!

Picture with me, if you will, the absurdity of finding yourself swimming in the middle of the ocean.

Innovation is a tricky subject.

I’ve been reading this week about how humans learn, and effective ways of transferring knowledge.

Observability, so hot right now.

I was originally going to call this post “What makes a programming language real?”

Long running spans are one of my biggest “we don’t really actually have a good standard solution for this” issues in opentelemetry.

When going on an observability journey, there tends to be a few concrete phases that every company goes through.

Caching is hard.

I like to home roll abstractions, but commoditise implementations.

One of the hardest things for people to understand with distributed systems is that eventual consistency is the same thing as eventual inconsistency.

I miss the forums.

If there’s one thing I wish I could burn entirely to the ground and wipe away all traces and remnants of, its the misplaced notion that the productivity of Knowledge Work can be managed, measured, analysed, and optimised as if all one needed to do was drip

Observability is a bit of a hot topic, and while it’s increasingly been playing a larger role in engineering strategy, I think the way it’s presented can often cause a lot of leaders to miss the value or to over-index on the wrong things.

Something that I find missing in almost every software company is this thing that I’m not sure I’ve seen explicitly called out anywhere, but I’m going to call it an Engineering Language.

I read this post from John Cutler and Tom Kerwin recently on how leaders navigate uncertainty and ambiguity and it intrigued me.

When starting a new job as a software engineer, it’s natural to feel the pressure of delivering immediate value and meeting the expectations of your role.

I see you want to hire a developer to work on internal developer tooling, developer experience, and the generally intangible but admirable goal of “making life better for devs”.

So the big thing that makes everything so difficult for browsers is that opentelemetry has a concept of a lifecycle for telemetry that doesn’t map very well to how you ergonomically propagate context and correlate traces together.

I was asked recently for my thoughts on a wonderful article about software correctness, human convenience, and flossing, and I ended up dumping out an entire blog post worth of thoughts.

Y’all ready for a story about one of the wildest fuckups production outages I ever took part in?

This blog post will be kept up to date as I find out more information and publish my findings.