I recently presented a talk at Monitorama 2024 titled 'The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry'. The slides for that talk are available at https://austinlparker.github.io/monitorama-2024.
The presentation is built in reveal.js -- you can access the speaker notes/transcript by pressing the 's' key. You can also check out the talk recording! It was a lot of fun, thanks for having me, Monitorama!
This post is a response/companion to Hazel Weakly's excellent 'Redefining Observability'. You should probably read it first, and perhaps Fred Hebert's commentary on it, 'A Commentary on Defining Observability'. I don't necessarily plan on re-treading a lot of the ground that both of them do, and instead, want to focus on breaking down some of the definitions and missing pieces that both present.
Continue reading "Re-Redefining Observability"I'm going to weigh in on the Redis thing.
Continue reading "Don’t Work For Projects That Don’t Have Open Governance"
I like to joke that I got into developer relations because I was the rare programmer that could carry on a conversation for more than five minutes. Like all good jokes, its mostly true -- I think one of the foundational abilities of the role is a strong ability to translate highly specific and nuanced technical concepts into something that's broadly consumable by other technologists or a general audience. I've noticed a worrying trend over the past couple of years about technical communication, however. In short, the gap between what people need to understand and what's being communicated to them has never been larger.
Continue reading "Regrets of a Technical Communicator"
I'm knee-deep in production for Learning OpenTelemetry, releasing in just over a month. This is my second book, so I figured it was a good time to sit down and write up a couple of things I learned while writing this one, if only so when the writing bug gets me again in a year or so I can look back at this post and ask myself if it was really worth it.
Mostly joking, but writing is hard! There's a real balance you need to strike, especially when doing technical-but-not-documentation content.
Continue reading "Lessons Learned from Learning OpenTelemetry"