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Ethan Gunderson

Writing, reviews, and other stuff by Ethan Gunderson, software engineer.

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Latest posts

JT Van Zandt on Organization

Being organized allows you to do what you love with less energy, you know, more efficiency. And it's just important to develop a system for yourself that works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ss1RDbQZ48

Training at ElixirConf 2026

In an era of mass AI generated code, and decreased human scrutiny in code review, learning how to observe systems has never been more important. It's good timing that Zack and I are returning to ElixirConf to bring more observability training. A whole day of starting from first principles in Telemetry all that through creating dashboards to visualize trace and metrics. We'll cover how to bridge…

Primer Paso

Watermelon Anaerobic Co-Ferment

The first time I had this coffee was back in 2023 during a visit to NYC, and I've been waiting to get another bag since. It's great on v60 with a standard 1:16 or 1:17 ratio. It's even better on espresso though. At 18g in, 42g out, 3 bar pressure the acidity really shines.

My Rating System

Rating things feels weird. We all have different tastes and tendencies. What I love you may hate, and I don't want to yuck someone's yum. Still, a decent number of people asking for recommendations, especially for coffee. Being able to give them some sort of baseline for the types of coffee I rate highly vs avoid is helpful to determine if they my recommendations will be helpful to them or not. I…

Grant Achatz on Creativity

> People like to think the creative process is romantic. The artist drifts to sleep and wakes to a brilliant idea already formed. For me, creativity is the result of hard work and study, and the willingness to present yourself with difficult problems and refuse to let go until you find the answer. You cannot decide to turn it on or off. You can only keep asking the questions and tapping into the…

Darrrk

I don't remember the last time I intentionally purchased a bag of dark roasted coffee. But I'll be damned if this doesn't make an excellent traditional cup of espresso. 18g in, 36g out, 9 bars of pressure on my Flair - 🤌😚

Colombia Yessica Parra Papayo

Another one of Trade's secret drop coffees. Described as funky and fruity, which is true if you let the cup cool a bit, but I'm having a hard time getting much from this bag.

Super Power Plum

I really wanted to like this coffee, but I found it pretty mediocre. Not bad, not great, at times a hint of that plumb action inferred by the name, but those moments were fleeting for me.

Colombia Jose Uribe Lasso

Peru David Flores La Neblina

Eh. The specs on this coffee are great, but it's just not memorable to me. Still need to try it on espresso to see if that changes anything.

Ethiopia Supernatural

My love hate relationship with Trade continues. On paper I should love this coffee, but I'm not getting anything out of it.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate

I went into this novella blind and finished it not entirely sure if I liked it or not, nor do I really know how to describe it. There’s little traditional plot, character development, or action. Instead, the story follows four astronauts exploring distant planets, told through logs sent back to Earth. The story starts with a set of ideas on how slower than light travel could be possible, and how…

Project Hail Mary

I loved the book and the movie was everything that I hopped it would be.

Edwin Enrique Noreña - Smoothie

This coffee was full of funk and banana. Easily my favorite cup of 2026 so far.

Colombia Young Producers

This is my most reordered bag of coffee from PERC, maybe most reordered from anywhere. It's got a really nice funky flavor. I get more frosting than pink Starburst, but in general the flavor descriptors are there for me on v60.

Khruangbin Live at Radio City Music Hall: New York Edition

Ethiopia Chelchele

Blueberry bomb

Hades 2

Ethiopia Suke Werekata

A rare miss from PERC for me. I wasn't able to get much flavor out of this bag at all except a nondescript flavor of just..coffee. Only tried on a v60, but through different brew temps, grind settings, and water profiles, this bag was a miss. Not actively bad, but eh.

Colombia Diego Bermudez Castillo M-03

I normally stay in the fruit forward to funky end of the spectrum when it comes to coffee, so this medium roast, spice forward roast, was a bit out of the norm. I originally picked it up because I figured it would be a good coffee to break in my Flair espresso machine. I was right about that, but it also makes a nice cup of filtered coffee. Sweet with a lot of cinnamon spice. Comforting first cup…

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Hades

SLOs and SLAs are not Interchangeable Terms

I'm a self-proclaimed SLA/SLO cop. I’m passionate about using the correct terms. Misunderstanding these two terms can lead to serious issues in service operations. Let’s clarify the differences: * **Service Level Indicator (SLI):** A specific measurement of service performance, such as latency or error rates. * **Service Level Objective (SLO):** A target for those measurements—what we aspire to…

Telemetry Powered Observability

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak about Elixir, Telemetry, and Observability at Empex MTN on May 6th. I didn't realize how much I missed nerding out with people, in person. Getting to know more folks in the Elixir community was absolutely fantastic. This was my first conference talk in a long time, close to 8 years. While I definitely stumbled a little bit, I had a lot of fun putting…

Sparklines in Chart.js

A sparkline is a small, simple chart used to show trend information at a glance. Sparklines don't have axes or tooltips, just a small line of data points. While building Glean, I wanted a quick way to show the user how their accounts are performing over time. Sparklines were perfect for this use case. While Chart.js doesn’t have a first class sparkline chart option, the configurability of line…