Reducer #7: Correlating logs is harder than using traces
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Reducer — a newsletter where I share everything interesting I've read or found, plus new articles and books. Let’s dive in!
Engineering
Ep. #39, Sell the Sizzle With Jordan Simonovski of Atlassian @ O11ycast
Make it easier for developers to do the right thing
We can make it easier for them to do the right thing instead of incentivizing good practice. Creating a great default so they automatically do the right thing, but if they want to do what you think is the wrong thing, let them do it, but not by default. AirrQuote (Time 0:01:34)
How Atlassian collects telemetry and actually process it
We have pipelines that sanitize things that we think are sensitive and throwing them into different vendors’ buckets. We want to keep things as safe as possible. We do have a regulatory responsibility to make sure that sensitive data is protected. AirrQuote (Time 0:02:23)
What happens if you need grassroots influence rather than being able to come in with a gold standard?
We have a saying in the team called "sell the sizzle, not the sausage" We want to get people excited about all the new functionality of new opportunities that come up from good observability tooling. What developers actually get from the data they throw in, so I can say it's about the results you get even though the process is different. AirrQuote (Time 0:03:00)
How would you define observability?
How do we make it easier for developers to ask new questions about their systems? How do we make it easier for them to say during an incident: "what can I look at to understand what's going? What's breaking, and what was the answer? We've gone all-in on Open Telemetry as a standard and as part of that. We have assumed good defaults, so we built some SDKs from the ground up that automatically gathers the information we think is most important. AirrQuote (Time 0:04:00)
What techniques are you using to make it easier?
Finding what kind of information we can grab with an SDK. We're auto-wiring stuff into our Java apps to see what we can pull in on their behalf.
The more you can make things consistent, the more things you can do work out of the box, the easier it is for the people to see the value. Rather than check out which one of these five fields, we put the service name: serviceName, service_name, or service-name.
Developers are building products, and it's not their job to make observability; it is their job to solve problems for customers. If you can make it easy and magical and automatic for them to get to the observatory, then you can open their eyes to see how much better that makes them at their jobs. It's a lot to ask anyone to do two jobs. https://www.airr.io/quote/612f467ce042d5000f41bc2b
SLOs are a structured way of testing in production.
Thinking that SLO does a way of testing in production is totally true. It's a way of getting yourself a budget and allowing yourself to experiment with his parameters. You have that, and if you used everything, it's a sign that there's something wrong most of the time. You know how much is too much. AirrQuote (Time 0:14:03)
Photo by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird on Unsplash
Product
My Favorite Product Management Templates – Issue 37 @ lennysnewsletter.com
MongoDB has a lot of traffic to docs. Educational content that people would trade in information for is good to promote within the docs. They also had a lot of success targeting people that went to the docs with Facebook ads. AirrQuote (Time 0:10:33)
Content
Then do the same for something you did that didn't work, why it failed, and what you learned from it (You might be surprised which one performs better) Quote Tweet Amanda Natividad @amandanat · 11h Here's a topic for your next newsletter, thread, or blog post: Look at your resume. Pick out a business outcome you were responsible for.
People
Tweets From Amanda Natividad @ @amandanat on Twitter
Most people think reference checks are useless. Because they're doing it wrong. 7 questions to ask a reference — and become a better manager: (View Tweet)
Tools
Listen and Publish YouTube Shows as Podcasts - Listenbox @ listenbox.app
A great tool to add youtube videos to Airr and take notes while watching them.
That’s it for this week! Hit me up if you have any thoughts, feedback, or insights to share. Otherwise, see you next week!