Two questions from the Jagged Frontier
A non-exhaustive list of questions that I do not really see discussed as much as I think they probably deserve to be discussed.
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if i have to read one more piece of generated text i will kms
there are approximately three good reasons to generate text that another human being will read.
Reflection, September 2025
I'm tired.
The Future Of Software Is Small
The dominance of SaaS platforms in business and pleasure today is a cyclic one. If you went back in time to the 1980's and told them that 21% of the industry was using the same CRM platform they'd probably nod serenely, knowing that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
Everyone Is Wrong, All The Time.
Much has been written about the nature of large language models to hallucinate. In a stunning victory for linguistic determinism, we've decided that this means that LLM output is somehow 'wrong'. I would, briefly, argue the opposite. This isn't to say that LLMs don't hallucinate but that the word isn't really a useful one in the way that it's commonly used.
JSON Is The Wrong Content Type For LLM Inputs.
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 think this is well-intentioned but not super optimal.
I Set Up My iPad Again, Please Clap.
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. Will it work this time? No clue! The iPad is, like, 75% of what I need out of a computer but most days I feel like I prefer using my MacBook Air for general fuckin' around, and idk what I'd really get out of the iPad. The dream, I guess, is that I would only…
Wide Events, Personal Software, and You.
I recently built a fun little project called 777-BSKY. It looks at Bluesky trending topics, does some math, figures out what's most popular and slaps some TTS on it. You can call a phone number and have the output read back to you, kinda like Moviefone except all of the movies are talking about the twilight of the American experiment.
Introducing locol
The best projects to work on are the ones that scratch a few different itches at once. I've wanted to write a native macOS application for years now, but I've always found building GUIs to be tedious and -- frankly -- hard to wrap my head around. I've also wanted a better way to manage a local OpenTelemetry Collector on my Mac for quite a while as well. Thanks to the magic of artificial…
One Weird Trick
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 don't really want to bore you with a repetition of the ills facing society here at the beginning of 2025, other than to say there's a lot of them. Instead, I want to talk about why I'm optimistic, too.
The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry
I recently presented a talk at Monitorama 2024 titled 'The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry'. The slides for that talk are available at https://austinlparker.github.io/monitorama-2024.
Re-Redefining Observability
This post is a response/companion to Hazel Weakly's excellent 'Redefining Observability'. You should probably read it first, and perhaps Fred Hebert's commentary on it, 'A Commentary on Defining Observability'. I don't necessarily plan on re-treading a lot of the ground that both of them do, and instead, want to focus on breaking down some of the definitions and missing pieces that both present.
Don't Work For Projects That Don't Have Open Governance
I'm going to weigh in on the Redis thing.
Regrets of a Technical Communicator
I like to joke that I got into developer relations because I was the rare programmer that could carry on a conversation for more than five minutes. Like all good jokes, its mostly true -- I think one of the foundational abilities of the role is a strong ability to translate highly specific and nuanced technical concepts into something that's broadly consumable by other technologists or a general…
Lessons Learned from Learning OpenTelemetry
I'm knee-deep in production for Learning OpenTelemetry, releasing in just over a month. This is my second book, so I figured it was a good time to sit down and write up a couple of things I learned while writing this one, if only so when the writing bug gets me again in a year or so I can look back at this post and ask myself if it was really worth it.
What Do We Mean When We Talk About OpenTelemetry?
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. One of the bigger challenges around OpenTelemetry is that you can think of it as a vector. It not only has a shape, it has a direction, and the way you think about the project and…
OTel TIL - What The Heck Is Instrumentation, Anyway?
Ever asked ChatGPT about OpenTelemetry? There's a pretty good chance that what it spits out at you started out as something I wrote, years ago. When the project started, I picked up where I left off maintaining the docs and website for OpenTracing and built the first few versions of opentelemetry.io (seen here in late 2019), including most of its initial documentation, concept pages, and so forth.…
Telemetry Ergonomics
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. Maybe you're one of them, but odds are, you aren't. This disconnect becomes very obvious when I look at the way that people prefer to use observability tools, and more specifically, the way that those tools build workflows…
Selling The Vision
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. It's easy to stare at it from a distance, squint your eyes, and wonder what the hell we're doing over here. The further away you are from the core contributors, maintainers, and weird little observability guys at the center of it all, the harder it is…
Parsing Apache2 access logs with the OpenTelemetry Collector
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. Want to get your access.log files from Apache? Here's the config.
Data Bores
Sampling is a method to reduce the volume of data processed and stored by observability tools. There’s a variety of methods and algorithms that can be employed to do this, and most observability practices will wind up using a blend of them, but this blog isn’t necessarily about how to implement any individual technique. No, what I’m interested in discussing is the why of sampling, the outcomes…
Deploying on Friday the 13th
“I wasn’t trained to do that.”
Observability Cannot Fail, It Can Only Be Failed
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 this last pursuit that’s convinced me that if this whole computer thing doesn’t work out, I’m screwed — I don’t have the spirit of a tradesperson in my body. This revelation was prompted by my journey to install laminate flooring in my office, which has until now…
Observability and the Decentralized Web
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. Ongoing regulatory pressures and the slow burn of Twitter at the hands of Elon Musk aside, there's an increasing body of evidence that courts and governments will take a more active hand in the moderation and control of user-generated content. This…
The Blockchain Haters Guide To The AT Protocol
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.
Stop Trying To Make Observability Happen
"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,…
Virtual Events Are Dead, Long Live Virtual Events
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. Being offered an alcohol wipe by a smiling, unmasked flight attendant before spending hours breathing other people’s air in a narrow metal tube is panglossian, to say the least.
Incentives and Power
I wrote a post a little while ago about how SRE is really just sneaky anarchism, and this is somewhat of a followup.
The Commodification of DevOps
It's been quipped more than once that most amazing Silicon Valley innovations are simply a bunch of nerds poorly recreating a service that already exists, but with an app. While I find this to be in some ways a truism (after all, there is nothing new under the sun), it's a fairly trite observation. What's far more interesting is how the organizations that build and deliver these 'innovations'…
Deserted Island DevOps Postmortem
In my experience, it’s the ideas that you don’t expect to work that really take off. When I registered a domain name a month ago for Deserted Island DevOps, I can say pretty confidently that I didn’t expect it to turn into an event with over 8500 viewers. Now that we’re on the other side of it, I figured I should write the story about how it came to be, how I produced it, and talk about some…
Mono in Debian 9 Containers
Running Debian 9 and need to install the mono repository? You'll find advice for 8 that suggests using the following:
OpenTracing for ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI
Preface - I really like what Microsoft is doing with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.