Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium

Long running spans are one of my biggest “we don’t really actually have a good standard solution for this” issues in opentelemetry. They’re something I’ve run into before, weirdly frequently, and especially so when attempting to try and instrument front-end or mobile facing systems.It turns out, though, that the issues here with long running...

When going on an observability journey, there tends to be a few concrete phases that every company goes through. Understanding how those unfold and take shape as you mature your observability practices can help you identify when you’ll run into certain types of challenges, and when you’ll start really wanting certain tools and practices to help...

Caching is hard. So hard. But also, we are so fucking bad at it. Every time I have to use a public wifi setup I have a joker moment. Does absolutely nobody test shit on anything less than wired symmetric gigabit anymore?Web SPA apps are some of the worst for this. Motherfucker, you have the same fucking iconography for three years, why does it...

I like to home roll abstractions, but commoditize implementations.What I mean by that is a fairly simple rule that has a very powerful effect, but can be tricky to find the right balance.Home rolling the abstraction, to me, means deeply exploring and fleshing out out an abstraction from whole cloth, whether it be an interface, or a mental model,...

I thought today about why I do what I do.When I was a child, I yearned very deeply to be seen and recognized for who I truly was. I didn’t quite realize the cause of this, or reason. I couldn’t have articulated it had I tried. Nevertheless, it was there.However, though I tried desperately, nobody ever saw me or recognized me, and so I grew up...