Avner Shanan

Out of Context: Link Round Up

Reading

A pair of articles on observability, the first from Hazel Weakly, and the second a “yes and” response to Weakly’s from Fred Hebert. Between the two of them there’s a lot of good history, context, and nuance - after reading these articles I feel more confident in my thinking around “how to do observability.” Worth reading both articles if you’ve ever sat there wondering “okay, but where do I start?” when it comes to observability.

On power and and being a manager, this essay is excellent: You’re Always Carrying a Cannon

Since I have a little more time on my hands than I used to, I’ve been doing a bit of exploration into technical spaces I have been interested in but haven’t really had the spare capacity to engage with.

• I started learning a bit more about elixir. This was inevitable, really, given how damn excited about it Matt Baker is, and I’m glad I’m finding the time for it. No real thoughts yet, as I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’m working my way slowly through Elixir School, but I’d love to hear it if anyone has suggestions for better or complimentary resources.
• I’m a big fan of marginalia and annotations generally, physical and digital. I’ve been using hypothes.is since it was still a non-profit, and I almost never read a physical book without a pen in my hand. I’ve also had an interest in ActivityPub (I’ve been spending a lot more time on Mastodon than Twitter, lately). I started digging into the W3C’s Web Annotation Protocol and was pleasantly surprised to see that it’s actually built on top of AP (well, ActivityStreams. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, and here are some the nuggets I found down there:
  • dokieli - “a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions.” Looks interesting, haven’t had a chance to play around with it yet.
  • Solid - a specification for decentralized data stores
  • Web Annotation examples from the W3C

Memes n’ Such

And, last but not least, some good stuff from the internet. Not necessarily new, but new to me!

• In this house… (source)
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• The joys of remote work (source)
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