Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]

Ferd.ca

Ferd.ca
A Commentary on Defining Observability 2024/03/19 A Commentary on Defining Observability Recently, Hazel Weakly has published a great...
10 months ago
73
10 months ago
2024/03/19 A Commentary on Defining Observability Recently, Hazel Weakly has published a great article titled Redefining Observability. In it, she covers competing classical definitions observability, weaknesses they have, and offers a practical reframing of the concept in the...
Ferd.ca
The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents 2022/11/01 The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents A few weeks ago, a coworker of mine was running...
over a year ago
70
over a year ago
2022/11/01 The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents A few weeks ago, a coworker of mine was running an incident analysis in Jeli, and pointed out that the overall process was a big drag on their energy level, that it was hard to do, even if the final result was useful. They were...
Ferd.ca
The Review Is the Action Item 2024/05/30 The Review Is the Action Item I like to consider running an incident review to be its own...
8 months ago
69
8 months ago
2024/05/30 The Review Is the Action Item I like to consider running an incident review to be its own action item. Other follow-ups emerging from it are a plus, but the point is to learn from incidents, and the review gives room for that to happen. This is not surprising advice if...
Ferd.ca
Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops 2023/06/20 Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops This post contains a transcript of the...
a year ago
64
a year ago
2023/06/20 Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops This post contains a transcript of the talk I wrote for and gave at QCon New York 2023 for Vanessa Huerta Granda's track on resilience engineering. The official talk title was "Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback...
Ferd.ca
My Blog Engine is the Erlang Build Tool From time to time, people ask me what I use to power my blog, maybe because they like the minimalist...
5 months ago
51
5 months ago
From time to time, people ask me what I use to power my blog, maybe because they like the minimalist form it has. I tell them it’s a bad idea and that I use the Erlang compiler infrastructure for it, and they agree to look elsewhere. After launching my notes section, I had to...
Ferd.ca
Local Optimizations Don't Lead to Global Optimums I like to think that I write code deliberately. I’m an admittedly slow developer, and I want to...
2 months ago
50
2 months ago
I like to think that I write code deliberately. I’m an admittedly slow developer, and I want to believe I do so on purpose. I want to know as much as I can about the context of what it is that I'm automating. I also use a limited set of tools. I used old computers for a long...
Ferd.ca
Carrots, sticks, and making things worse This blog post originally appeared on the LFI blog but I decided to post it on my own as well. Every...
4 months ago
44
4 months ago
This blog post originally appeared on the LFI blog but I decided to post it on my own as well. Every organization has to contend with limits: scarcity of resources, people, attention, or funding, friction from scaling, inertia from previous code bases, or a quickly shifting...
Ferd.ca
Counting Forest Fires 2024/01/26 Counting Forest Fires Today I'm hitting my 3 years mark at Honeycomb, and so I thought...
a year ago
42
a year ago
2024/01/26 Counting Forest Fires Today I'm hitting my 3 years mark at Honeycomb, and so I thought I'd re-publish one of my favorite short blog posts written over there, Counting Forest Fires, which has become my go-to argument when discussing incident metrics when asked to count...
Ferd.ca
A Distributed Systems Reading List 2024/02/07 A Distributed Systems Reading List This document contains various resources and quick...
12 months ago
38
12 months ago
2024/02/07 A Distributed Systems Reading List This document contains various resources and quick definition of a lot of background information behind distributed systems. It is not complete, even though it is kinda sorta detailed. I had written it some time in 2019 when coworkers...
Ferd.ca
A Bridge Over a River Never Crossed 2023/01/01 A Bridge Over a River Never Crossed When I first started my forever project, a peer to...
over a year ago
34
over a year ago
2023/01/01 A Bridge Over a River Never Crossed When I first started my forever project, a peer to peer file sync software using Interval Tree Clocks, I wanted to build it right. That meant property-based testing everything, specifying the protocol fully, dealing with error...
Ferd.ca
Negotiable Abstractions 2023/12/21 Negotiable Abstractions When I used to write more software and do more architecture...
a year ago
32
a year ago
2023/12/21 Negotiable Abstractions When I used to write more software and do more architecture professionally (I still do, but less intensively so with the SRE title), one of the most important questions I'd seek answers to was "how do I cut this up?" Or more accurately, "how do...
Ferd.ca
The Law of Stretched [Cognitive] Systems 2022/12/15 The Law of Stretched [Cognitive] Systems One of the things I knew right when I started at...
over a year ago
28
over a year ago
2022/12/15 The Law of Stretched [Cognitive] Systems One of the things I knew right when I started at my current job is that a lot of my work would be for "nothing." I'm saying this because I work (as Staff SRE) for an observability vendor, and engineers tend to operate under the...
Ferd.ca
My favorite Erlang Container 2022/07/09 My favorite Erlang Container Joe Armstrong wrote a blog post titled My favorite Erlang...
over a year ago
26
over a year ago
2022/07/09 My favorite Erlang Container Joe Armstrong wrote a blog post titled My favorite Erlang Program, which showed a very simple universal server written in Erlang: universal_server()->receive{become,F}->F()end. You could then write a small program that could fit this...
Ferd.ca
Hiding Theory in Practice 2022/11/23 Hiding Theory in Practice I'm a self-labeled incident nerd. I very much enjoy reading...
over a year ago
25
over a year ago
2022/11/23 Hiding Theory in Practice I'm a self-labeled incident nerd. I very much enjoy reading books and papers about them, I hang out with other incident nerds, and I always look for ways to connect the theory I learn about with the events I see at work and in everyday life....