Useful Link: PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation

This documentation from PagerDuty on incident response is pretty good. It would need to be tailored for local conditions but it does highlight aspects of incident response that people might not be aware of (different roles during a major incident, for example). https://response.pagerduty.com/

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Learning Forth

One of my side projects for this year is to learn the programming language, Forth. Some people might consider this an odd language to learn. It is not a popular language. There are no hot startups using it (that I know of). It doesn't even show up in the top 100 languages in the TIOBE Index . However, I am convinced learning it is worthwhile. Some of my reasons for this are: Forth is probably the most successful and widely deployed language that nobody has heard of. It is the language used to develop OpenFirmware . This boot loader is installed on the laptops of the One Laptop Per Child Project , on PowerPC based Apple Mac computers, and on SPARC based computers from SUN Microsystems. It has also been used to develop to develop control software for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory , which is where it was developed. While not as widely used as C/C++, Forth is used a lot in embedded applications and has been ported to most micro-controllers. For example, the Forth, Inc. w...

First Post

Hello and welcome to the inane ramblings of an Irish software developer. The title of the blog comes from Lewis Carroll's, Through the Looking Glass . In the book, Alice goes running with the Red Queen, but they don't seem to make any progress. Alice remarks on this, saying, "Well in our country, you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing." The Red Queen replies, "A slow sort of country. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place." The Red Queen Effect is quite applicable to the software industry, and as I probably will be talking quite a bit about the software industry, I thought it would be a good name for a blog. I have a few objectives for my new blog. By writing here, I hope to learn how to write well. That is, I hope to learn how to write clearly and concisely, and be interesting at the same time. I also hope that this blog will become a good prof...

Useful Links: Logs and Metrics

This article explains why storing log messages alone is insufficient for robust operation of a software service. Metrics also need to be gathered and stored. https://medium.com/@copyconst…/logs-and-metrics-6d34d3026e38 tl;dr - Log volume can spike dramatically when user activity increases, especially when things go wrong. This makes it possible for an alerting system based on logs to be swamped. For a metrics system, volume increases with the number of metrics collected. This is stable and much less likely to fail or slow down during a crisis.

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