Category: Newsletter

Like several of the tech twitterati, I've recently been going goblin mode over at Bluesky, a federated social network in private beta. As a long-time crypto and blockchain skeptic, I decided to take a look at the published documentation for the protocol that underpins Bluesky and write some thoughts.

Caveat, before I go into this too much - the public docs are pretty good, but there's a lot of TBDs and under-defined terms. That said, I applaud the team for what they've been able to put together here -- it's pretty cool.

If I get something wrong, let me know! Would love to correct this or do a followup -- again, this isn't my area of expertise.

Continue reading "The Blockchain Haters Guide To The AT Protocol"

"It's not going to happen."

A friend of mine (@mononcqc) turned me on to an essay titled 'Unruly Bodies of Code in Time' the other day, and skimming through it made me consider a phrase I like to use when introducing observability concepts to folks. I give a talk every week or so to new cohorts of employees at Lightstep, talking them through our concept of what observability is, why it matters, etc.

If you're familiar with my work at all, it shouldn't surprise you that it takes about 30 minutes until the word 'trace', 'log', or 'metric' ever escapes my lips in these talks. Over time, my understanding of observability has matured and grown into something that, frankly, is rather disjoint from the innumerable 'observability solutions' that are marketed and sold to software developers.

Continue reading "Stop Trying To Make Observability Happen"