Software, thoughts, and stuff Blog

TL;DR The current generation of AI coding tools have given rise to a notion: non-technical users can now build real, production software- without a background in software engineering.

TL;DR I've found myself still occasionally hand-writing some code, even though I've gone almost entirely all-in on AI-assisted engineering.

TL;DR A possible explanation for why we observe such a discrepancy between the productivity gains from AI tools of seasoned senior software engineers versus their less-experienced counterparts: Inexperienced problem solvers have a tendency to get stuck wh…

TL;DR My daughter became a birder, and it's had some surprisingly positive effects on my life.

TL;DR This is a summary of hundreds of conversations I've had with prospective engineering managers about what life looks like as a manager- the purpose and responsibilities of the role, but more importantly- what you actually do every day.

TL;DR I've been looking for an excuse to do something more deliberate and ambitious with generative AI developer tools, so I created a Kubernetes controller which discovers Kubernetes-managed AWS load balancers, scrapes their CloudWatch metrics, and expos…

TL;DR A quick review of the "three pillars" of observability: logs, metrics, and traces- their strengths and weaknesses, how to match the right signals to particular use cases.

TL;DR As OpenTelemetry's adoption has surged, it's drawn increasing criticism: it's complex, isn't fully matured, and its user experience can feel... unpolished.

TL;DR Observability 2.0 is a vision of observability that seeks to replace the traditional "three pillars" of observability (metrics, logs, and traces) with a single source of truth: wide events.

TL;DR At SimpliSafe, we wanted to take advantage of the cost savings and performance improvements of AWS's Graviton processors (ARM64), but wanted to do it incrementally to manage risk.

TL;DR Due to looming IP address exhaustion, we've been migrating my company's Kubernetes workloads to IPv6.

TL;DR My team has built a developer platform that our developers really like, and is providing a ton of value for my company.

TL;DR I experienced first-hand what it was like to work in a company with a really strong culture of knowledge management, and watched what it took to build and sustain it.

TL;DR This is the story of the most impactful accomplishment of my career (building Vistaprint's Studio), which happened to be as an individual contributor.

TL;DR The most important feature of an internal developer platform is that the team that builds it has to compete to win over their users.

TL;DR We evaluated a number of observability vendors, with a focus on metrics, and did detailed PoCs with both Chronosphere and Grafana Cloud.

As part of an evaluation of Prometheus compatible monitoring solutions, I found the need to push our use of the OTEL Collector to handle some use cases like creating metrics allowlists, renaming metrics, or adding and modifying labels.

It was 2004, and I had a huge chip on my shoulder.

For most of my career, I've found that I tend to quickly develop a reputation in whatever company I'm working at.

I've been reflecting recently on a really formative period in my career, when I had a chance to be part of a massive experiment in progressive engineering management.