aparker.io

something new i've been trying, half as an experiment, half as a statement of minimalism is to reduce complexity/choice in my computing environments. to put it another way, i want there to be one unambigious way to do things on a computer, and then i want…

A non-exhaustive list of questions that I do not really see discussed as much as I think they probably deserve to be discussed.

there are approximately three good reasons to generate text that another human being will read. you are writing code with ai and the comments and symbols are mostly meant for consumption by other ai agents. you are running an ai agent/bot that is clearly…

I'm tired.

The dominance of SaaS platforms in business and pleasure today is a cyclic one.

Much has been written about the nature of large language models to hallucinate.

This isn't an exhaustive or fully baked idea yet, but I've been noticing a trend with MCP servers -- they love to just yeet a bunch of JSON at an LLM.

I feel like every few years I go through a "hm, i could probably just use an ipad for most things" so I spent today getting it set back up.

I recently built a fun little project called 777-BSKY.

The best projects to work on are the ones that scratch a few different itches at once.

I was reading Mike Masnick's piece in TechDirt the other day where he discusses tech optimism in the face of, well, everything that's going on in the world right now.

I recently presented a talk at Monitorama 2024 titled 'The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry'.

This post is a response/companion to Hazel Weakly's excellent 'Redefining Observability'.

I'm going to weigh in on the Redis thing.

Sunset over the desert in New Mexico.

I'm knee-deep in production for Learning OpenTelemetry, releasing in just over a month.

I'm motivated to write this post as a result of several discussions I've had over the past week or so prompted in part by the announcement of Elastic wanting to donate their profiling agent to the OpenTelemetry project.

Ever asked ChatGPT about OpenTelemetry?

I used to joke that there were maybe fifty people on the planet that really cared about 'observability' at a philosophical level, and I still maintain that I'm mostly correct.

OpenTelemetry can be a difficult project to describe to people, because the gap between what it is today and what it will be tomorrow is very large.

I couldn't find a ton of resources on this, but FYI -- the OpenTelemetry Collector's filelog receiver has a pretty robust regex parser built into it.

Sampling is a method to reduce the volume of data processed and stored by observability tools.

“I wasn’t trained to do that.”

Being between jobs is a great time to step back, do some self-critique, and engage in light home improvement for fun and or profit.

It's probably still too early to write the obituary for centralized social media and 'Web 2.0' — but if you squint, you can see it on the horizon.

Like several of the tech twitterati, I've recently been going goblin mode over at Bluesky, a federated social network in private beta.

"It's not going to happen."

By any scientific metric, the risk of COVID-19 infection is greater than it's ever been, while mitigation efforts have regressed to a shrugging emoji.

I wrote a post a little while ago about how SRE is really just sneaky anarchism, and this is somewhat of a followup.

"We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it."

In my experience, it’s the ideas that you don’t expect to work that really take off.

Running Debian 9 and need to install the mono repository?

Preface - I really like what Microsoft is doing with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.