Jennifer++

AI has become hard to talk about.

About 2 weeks ago, Anthropic researchers published a (pre-review) paper titled How AI Impacts Skill Formation.

I wrote this 7 years ago, a week or two before I started hormone replacement therapy.

You may have heard of Gresham's law before, even if you don't know it by name.

Traces and other telemetry exist to make your application more observable.

The Free Software movement has been remarkably successful.

If you're reading this, you probably know what the fediverse is.

Like a lot of other people, I joined the fediverse at the end of 2022.

I wrote recently that the fundamental role of software developers is discovery, learning, and building mental maps of the system.

Systems can be broadly categorized based on how complex they are.

The core, fundamental task in software engineering is to build mental models of the systems we work on.

If you've been anywhere near major news or social media in the last few months, you've probably heard repeatedly about so-called AI, ChatGPT, and large language models (LLMs).

When I say "my own ops", I'm talking about this blog, and its related infrastructure.

Continuing this journey of imagining an Advent of Code production system, it's time to give some thought to one of my favorite topics: observability.

We've been designing a system to help Santa's elves gather magical star fruit, following along with the scenarios presented in Advent of Code.