RSSAmplifier

Blog

matduggan.com

It's JSON all the way down

matduggan.comRSS feed ↗15 posts

Latest posts

OTel Isn't Going Well (And I Made A Spreadsheet About It)

For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?" Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put

I added a blogroll

I realized that it might be nice if you happen to stumble on this website if I had a way to recommend other websites you might enjoy. As it turns out this is a "blogroll", a concept I have never heard of before today but whatever. It'

Art Doesn't Scale

Listening to two acquaintances argue about if AI art is "art" is not a new experience for me, the now eternal debate between Doomer and Boomer. In this particular context, I'm listening to it as I wait for my surprisingly expensive iced latte in downtown Copenhagen.

Midnight Train to Stockholm

I was recently summoned to a meeting in Stockholm, a city I had somehow managed to avoid despite living in Copenhagen for years. My Swedish experience, up to this point, consisted entirely of trips to Malmö — the closest Swedish city to Denmark and, more importantly, home to a

Clickhouse is winning the Observability Wars

For roughly the last ten years, a meaningful percentage of my working hours have been spent thinking about observability. If you're not familiar with the term, "observability" is what we call it now that "monitoring" doesn't sound expensive enough. The actual work

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism

I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of

If I Could Make My Own GitHub

My friend and I have a game where we talk about what we'd do if we were rich. Not rich like 'paid off the mortgage' rich. Rich like a man who owns a submarine he's never been inside. Rich like a man whose third

You can absolutely have an RSS dependent website in 2026

I write stuff here. Sometimes the stuff is good. Sometimes it reads like I wrote it at 2 AM after an argument with a YAML file, which is because I did. But one decision I made early on was that I didn't want to offer an email newsletter.

I Can't See Apple's Vision

Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people,

Hosting a Snowflake Proxy

In the nightmarish world of 2026 it can be difficult to know how to help at all. There are too many horrors happening to quickly to know where one can inject even a small amount of assistance. However I wanted to quickly post about something I did that was easy,

Markdown Ate The World

I have always enjoyed the act of typing words and seeing them come up on screen. While my favorite word processor of all time might be WordPerfect ( here ), I've used almost all of them. These programs were what sold me on the entire value proposition of computers. They

Update to the Ghost theme that powers this site

I added a few modifications to the OSS Ghost theme that powers this site. You can get it here: https://gitlab.com/matdevdug/minimal-ghost-theme Added better image caption support. Added the cool Mastodon feature outlined here to attribute posts from your site back to your Mastodon username by

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter.

I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform

Until recently the LLM tools I’ve tried have been, to be frank, worthless. Copilot was best at writing extremely verbose comments. Gemini would turn a 200 line script into a 700 line collection of gibberish. It was easy for me to, more or less, ignore LLMs for being

The Small Web is Tricky to Find

One of the most common requests I've gotten from users of my little Firefox extension( https://timewasterpro.xyz ) has been more options around the categories of websites that you get returned. This required me to go through and parse the website information to attempt to put them into