Technology Commentary

Exploring a Postgres query plan

The end of a dramatic weekend in tech is that OpenAI has split and Microsoft is partnered with one and has hired the other; this is the ultimate failure case of what should have been a for-profit c…

A new paper from Google researchers found that the transformer technology behind tools like ChatGPT is not very good at generalizing.

When your microservices stop communicating as they should, monitoring gRPC is an essential step toward figuring out what's wrong. Get to know how gRPC monitoring works, the different approaches available and how to get the most out of gRPC monitoring solutions for powering high-performance, distributed systems.

Would you rather yell at your chest or pull out your phone?

The Value Flywheel Effect is a worthwhile read. It’s imperfect, but a fascinating look into real-world application of Wardley mapping, and a rare view of a company’s engineering strategy. I’m currently diving into the topic of engineering strategy, and a sub-topic that I’ve not previously spent much time on is Wardley maps. As I dug into it a bit more, The Value Flywheel Effect by Anderson, McCann, and O’Reilly was recommended as a primer, so I bought a copy and spend some time working through it.

code, audio, and life developments by michael chadwick

This week we're diving into data streaming, exploring fundamental concepts, practical applications, and tools to get you started on your data streaming journey.

We’re releasing a set of changes that builds on the foundation of our earlier WireGuard performance work, significantly improving UDP throughput on Linux. As with the previous work, we intend to upstream these changes to WireGuard. Our changes improve throughput for HTTP/3, QUIC, and other UDP-based applications through the use of segmentation offloads. UDP throughput over Tailscale increases 4x on bare metal Linux, and pushes past (for now) the in-kernel WireGuard implementation on that hardware. You can experience these improvements in Tailscale v1.54.

Craig digs into the architecture behind a slick IoT data platform including Postgres, the Citus extension, and pg_partman partitioning. Add these together with columnar compression and you've got a fully open source and scalable IoT data stack.

Warning: Opinions expressed may not be suitable for all audiences! 😂 TL;DR By the end of...

A few days ago, I made a social media post about Google vs. the Open Web. It received some responses, so I’ll reproduce it below with some...

IT organizations that invest in observability tools can recover services faster, remediate security events sooner, and identify the impact of incidents better, according to Splunk’s annual observability research.

I used to believe there was a right way to do APIs. I don’t anymore. I know better. I’ve seen too many APIs. I’ve seen too many people get frustrated that we didn’t do the API in the right way. Anybody claiming to have the right way is selling you digital moose diarrhea. The right way to do an API is less about the API, and everything about the process, and who you have involved in producing and consuming the APIs. For technologists it is hard to see the process and the people and it is easy to just focus on the technology—–a mistake I see made over and over in the world of APIs.

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

Regular container maintenance is like regular dental checkups: Nobody likes doing it, but avoidance makes things much worse.

For DevOps teams, immutable infrastructure offers a transformative approach to organizational security for companies of all sizes.

Originally published July 2015 In 2002, Professor Enrico Zaninotto, Dean of Economics at the University of Trento, gave a keynote at the Extreme Programming conference. It was the clearest technical talk I have ever seen, even though it was delivered by a non-programmer in an unfamiliar language. What set the talk apart was the clarity and depth of the thought behind it.

When I published my recent story about where API gateways might be going, I received pushback the most about my inclusion of code execution as a core platform capability. Which I would agree with in our grandfathers or even father’s API gateway realm, but in a gitops, serverless, edge, and programmable API gateway realty, I see things differently. I see a world where the API gateway is part of the fabric of the web. Our father’s API gateway ended up baked into the cloud, but the next generation of API gateways will just a DNS record away, while enjoying a federated and programmable life serving up goodness (not always).

This directory contains a curated compilation of key players offering APIs for data extraction. I write a brief overview of each service. I also include a link to the official website, pricing, and other relevant information.

Developers, enterprises and vendors are backing vendor-neutral approaches to GraphQL federation.

Kubernetes was designed by Google to operate huge Google properties, and many of us don’t need that sort of scale.

Grafana Labs acquired Asserts.ai to help provide users with easier and more autonomous analysis of metric data.

Effective observability can diminish business interruption, troubleshooting time and engineering burnout while increasing customer satisfaction.

Almost no existing security tools monitor or report on threats to client-side applications. This unaddressed gap raises significant security concerns.