Recent content on Josh Lee Creates

 Zen AI Cohabitation: How I learned to embrace the slop
 
 
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 Our tech lives are surrounded by AI. Everywhere we look: social media posts, videos, blog posts, and code. Companies expect employees to embrace AI, but at what cost? And what’s it doing to our mental health? While it’s satisfying to create with AI, it feels like we’re…

 Observability is Broken and Open-Source (will be) the Solution
 
 
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 The Observability industry is built on a fundamental promise: Send all of your telemetry data to your vendor of choice, and they will apply their magic sauce to turn that telemetry into “insights.” 
 In the beginning this promise was predicated on fundamental…

 O11y in One: ClickHouse as a Unified Telemetry Database
 
 
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 Slides 
 OpenTelemetry is often introduced as a way to send your metrics, traces, and logs to separate backend databases. But in reality, most organizations juggle at least half a dozen monitoring tools in production. What we really need isn’t just a standardized way to…

 Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OTel’s Vendor-Neutrality
 
 
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 Telemetry That Matters
 
 
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 OpenTelemetry: Playtime Is Over
 
 
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 Keynote: Designing Data Systems That Keep Up with AI
 
 
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 OpenTelemetry: Playtime Is Over
 
 
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 So you finally got your organization to invest in OpenTelemetry. You carefully evaluated observability backends and picked the perfect one. Everything is awesome. Then twelve months later, your costs have skyrocketed and you can’t explain why. What happened? 
 This talk examines how to emit meaningful…

 OpenTelemetry: Playtime Is Over
 
 
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 So you finally got your organization to invest in OpenTelemetry. You carefully evaluated observability backends and picked the perfect one. Everything is awesome. Then twelve months later, your costs have skyrocketed and you can’t explain why. What happened? 
 This talk examines how to emit meaningful…
DevOps is a Foreign Language - Friday 10:00am, Ballroom F 


 
 
 
 

 Magical Mystery Tour - Friday 12:30pm, Ballroom A 


 
 
 
 

 
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 DevOps is a Foreign Language 
 Magical Mystery Tour 


 DevOps is a Foreign Language
 
 
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 roadmap.sh 

Monitoring a homelab shouldn’t require a PhD in observability pipelines. Yet somehow, we all end up with a rat’s nest of exporters, agents, and databases that barely talk to each other. After years of fighting this complexity, I’ve landed on the OpenTelemetry Collector as the single tool that ties everything together. 
 ClickHouse is the other piece of the puzzle here.…

 Magical Mystery Tour: Roundup of Observability Datastores
 
 
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 From plain-old Postgres to the Grafana stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, and Mimir), OpenSearch, Cassandra, and ClickHouse, the landscape of telemetry storage options is as vast as it is overwhelming. With so many choices, how do we decide which datastore is right for the job? In this…

 2025 has been a busy year for me - 100k miles flown to get to 24 conferences across 12 countries. That’s a lot of time moving! 
 As a result of two plus years of this type of travel, I’ve developed some systems that aren’t perfect, but help make all the movement a little more manageable. 
 
 The First Rule of DevRel Travel: We’re all in this together
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 Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OTel’s Vendor-Neutrality
 
 
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 Magical Mystery Tour: Roundup of Observability Datastores
 
 
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 O11y in One: ClickHouse as a Unified Telemetry Database
 
 
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 Slides

 Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OTel’s Vendor-Neutrality
 
 
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 Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OTel’s Vendor-Neutrality
 
 
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 Magical Mystery Tour: Roundup of Observability Datastores
 
 
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 Slides

 Fast, Cheap, DIY Observability
 
 
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 Log Structured Merge Tree Blog 
 Kubernetes Cluster Logging with ClickHouse® and OpenTelemetry | Altinity Blog 
 Kubernetes Cluster Logging with the OpenTelemetry Collector and ClickHouse® | Grafana | Open Source - YouTube 
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 O11y in One: ClickHouse as a Unified Telemetry Database
 
 
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 Where’s the Auto in Auto-Instrumentation?
 
 
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 Tracing a Cloud-Native Database
 
 
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 Modern Application Debugging: An Intro to OpenTelemetry
 
 
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 In this talk, Joshua will share his insights and experiences with OpenTelemetry, an open-source project that offers protocols, APIs, and SDKs for collecting metrics, traces, and logs from applications and services. He will cover the comprehensive…

 DevOps is a Foreign Language (or Why There Are No Junior SREs)
 
 
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 DevOps has a notoriously steep learning curve. Getting started in the field can feel like being dropped in a foreign country without the ability to understand anything about the language. 
 This talk explores parallels between learning DevOps and acquiring a…
I’m excited to announce the launch of a new limited-series podcast focused on AI workflows, automation, and how we’re all adapting to this rapidly changing landscape. 
 
 Why This Podcast?
 
 
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 The pace of change has made the future foggy. My co-host Mya and I don’t know what it looks like, but we believe: 
 
 The…

 My NixOS-Powered Homelab
 
 
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 FOSDEM 2025 - My Nix-Powered Homelab 
 Nix & NixOS Website 
 GitHub - joshleecreates/nixos-proxmox 
 GitHub - joshleecreates/nix-config 
 NixOS + Proxmox: A Recipe for a Declarative Homelab · Josh Lee Creates 
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 Running Databases in Kubernetes the Cloud Native Way
 
 
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 Kubernetes is all the rage in enterprise IT today. Your boss just read that databases are going cloud native and wants you to make it happen. This talk tells you how. We’ll start with a quick overview of the wants and needs of your average database. We’ll then show practical ways to map…

 Note: I no longer use this setup. This post is kept for reference but the approach described here has been deprecated in my homelab. 
 
 In this post we’ll use Tailscale to connect Proxmox VE hosts across the public internet. We’ll do this by combining Proxmox SDNs (Software Defined Networks) with Tailscale for overlay networking. 
 
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 O11y in One: ClickHouse as a Unified Telemetry Database
 
 
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 My NixOS-Powered Homelab
 
 
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 Tracing a Cloud-Native Database
 
 
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 Modern Application Debugging: An Intro to OpenTelemetry
 
 
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