Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium

Observability, so hot right now. Over the years, we’ve seen observability go from an unknown concept to a ubiquitious phrase that everyone is desperate to stamp on their products. We’ve seen projects come, evolve, and die. We’ve seen technologies emerge out of the ashes, born from the tears of SREs long departed. Yet, amongst all of this growth,...

I was originally going to call this post “What makes a programming language real?” because I saw some people picking a fight on the internet about this type of topic, yet again, and it got me thinking as to why we even broach the topic in the first place. Surely, one might think, a programming language can just exist peacefully without being...

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...