Blog

I have stuffed so much into [my website](https://github.com/ChrisChinchilla/chrischinchilla.com) over the years it was starting to creak at the seams. For most of its life, at least the life I can remember, I used [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com). When the life of this website began, Jekyll was still fairly new and my mind was blown by static site generators (I probably migrated from Drupal, which was my thing back in the early 2000s). When I reworked it a couple of years ago, I considered other options but ended up settling back to what I already knew well. In honesty, Jeky...

I have long been concerned about the state of browsers and the dominant hegemony of one browser engine. OK, to be fair, it's a duopoly, but one of those options is almost exclusively restricted to one platform, so it's... Like many things in tech, it's complicated.

Or, maybe in a more click-generating sub-heading, “how to combine creative writing and programming to create interactive fiction”. In this post and the accompanying video version, I look at how people have created works of fiction where you have a degree of control over the narrative for the past 60 years. This includes paper-based books, computer games, and much more. I realise that the history may go further back than the 1970s, but that’s where I chose to start my adventure, and maybe I’ll l...

For Windows and macOS users, Docker Desktop has been the main way to use Docker containers for many years. While it remains a viable and usable option for hobbyists and small development teams, recent pricing changes for larger user bases sent people looking for alternatives. I am not looking to replace Docker Desktop myself, but I was interested in trying the alternatives and seeing how they compared.

I have been using Parallels for a couple of years now, primarily for running Windows virtual machines (VMs), but occasionally Linux VMs too. I mostly use it for playing games, testing, and the occasional Windows-only application. There are some other long-standing options such as VirtualBox, QEMU, and VMWare. I am intentionally ignoring anything that also runs containers, such as Docker, as that’s a different use case, and a whole other gamut of options. Recent changes in macOS suddenly bought...

Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar is a regular time to take a look at what experienced industry experts think might be the next wave of tools, practices, and technologies to consider or stop using. I always look forward to adding many new “blips” to my list, or seeing which are growing in adoption since you last took a look. Version 27 is out now, and it continues some trends that the radar has been following for a while, such as “platform as a service” or forms of group programming. This round-u...

I have always loved messing around with operating systems and desktop environments. I believe my first graphical operating system was AmigaOS. In the decades since I have worked through various Windows versions, every version of macOS since 7.0, different Linux flavors and combinations, and many other small niche OSs I have forgotten about in a sea of windows and menus. I first heard about SerenityOS via a news item on the Changelog. They mentioned that a handful of open-source programmers were...

It's Cybersecurity awareness month every October and this year I thought I'd share something relevant from my recent trip to cover IT Arena in Lviv, Ukraine. While I was there I bumped into some of the team from MacPaw a macOS and iOS software company based in Kyiv, Ukraine. I have met MacPaw employees many times at conferences over the years, and even once visited their wonderful offices in Kyiv where I saw their famous Mac museum and met their equally famous office cats. They are probably b...

I have been to many tech conferences over the years. I have sat in so many startup pitches and talks that are barely masked marketing pitches. I have introduced myself and told people what I do and where I am from so many times that it all becomes something of a blur. Despite the repetition and occasional tedium, I still enjoy attending these events, especially after the best part of a two-year absence. There’s the opportunity to meet new people, and visit new places, and typically amongst the...

Well, it’s August… The silly season, or the quiet season for news depending on your perspective and country. Still, before we all prepare for packed announcement times in September and October here’s a few observability and cloud native related nuggets from across the interwebs.

Every time Apple announces a new macOS beta, I am tempted to somehow figure out how to install it alongside my daily operating system. I then realise it's harder than I hoped, or that I don't have a large enough external drive available, and then give up on the idea.

Well hello there! If you’re reading this monthly round up of Observability (and related) news, then you’re one of the few not on vacation and I thank you 🙇 . That last sentence was basically me making an excuse for not having too much to write about, but there’s just enough Interesting tidbits, so let’s get started.

Ian and Chris speak with Cristian Heilmann, Principal Program Manager Developer Tools at Microsoft about his long career through developer relations/evangelism, teaching technical skills, and so much more!

Learn about the unintended environmental impact and cost of the proliferation of cloud services, frameworks, and "throw an other service at it" development.

Phew! A group of Chronospherians attended Monitorama back in person in Portland and we had a whistlestop (partial) week meeting customers and observability enthusiasts. I had a talk which sparked a lot of interesting discussion, we hosted a very successful whisk(e)y tasting, and all in all, had a great time.

What are the hidden impacts of all the infrastructure and dependencies that are used to run a cloud native application?

Navigate what open source monitoring standards are available, where in the ecosystem they fit, and how interoperable they are with each other.

Yes, KubeCon returned with vengeance to Europe, and over 7000 cloud native hungry folks made their way to Valencia to see what was new in the world of Kubernetes and cloud computing. There was a lot that happened, and for more detail, read our wrap up post, the rest of this newsletter summarizes some of the most relevant topics.

This post looks at the first steps for instrumenting a JavaScript application to report OpenTelemetry metrics.

Observability is fast changing from a practice that those close to engineering knew was useful, to a practice that everyone knows is useful for technical and business reasons. A handful of posts from April highlighted this, and none more than a post from the pragmatic programmer by Gergely Orosz.The post digs into what happened to cause Atlassian’s recent week-long outage that hit their SLA promises hard, at over 15% below their target. I’m sure Atlassian has an observability solution, but as t...

Many years ago, I took over a small publishing company, that's an entirely different story, and not relevant now, but as part of it, I acquired a Google Apps for business account. For years, I had access to "business" Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts/Meet, and more. Slowly, Google chipped away at what they gave you for free, which made perfect sense, but I knew the time would come when I would need to move on. [That time came this year (2022)](https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en-GB) and it was time to figure out what I could replace th...

The sun is rearing its sleepy head across much of the northern hemisphere, making news a little quiet this month. But we have a few choice items for you, and with the first in-person conference seasons in a while on the horizon, there’s plenty more to come!

As big fans of bestowing the positives of distributed tracing, we’re excited to see so many others in the observability space discussing the subject.

Over the past months, I've been slowly assembling a suite of self-hosted tools and services on a shiny new RaspberryPi 400, and finally, I think I am finished and ready to write up my experiences. At the least, it will help remind me what I have, but I hope it might also help others taking similar journeys. _Updated on 20th February 2022 to include changes I added to the setup._ ## Disclaimer Blogs take time to write, and I hope this helps you. Some of the products here are affiliate links, bu...

There are many services and tools to help manage microservices. This post looks at some options to highlight the similarities, differences, and when or why to use one.

I was a happy, loyal, and paying [Evernote](https://evernote.com/)customer for ten years. I loved the integrated toolchain it provided, with the ability to draw, annotate, tag, OCR, and much, much more. It did everything I needed in a note-taking application, and more besides, such as basic task management and a dumping ground for miscellaneous ideas. And then came version 10. I have not made a secret of my dislike of poorly implemented cross-platform applications that serve business interests far more than customer i...

There are many services and tools to help manage microservices. This post looks at some options to highlight the similarities, differences, and when or why to use one.

Welcome to 2022 🥳 and a year that already promises to be as lively and active for Observability.

Docs as code is an increasingly popular approach for tech writers that follows similar principles for writing that developers follow for writing code. Docs as code typically means writing in markup languages such as markdown, asciidoc, or restructured text. The tools for writing in these markup languages are different from the specialized technical writing tools you might have used before, and again, are often designed for coding or general writing. This post looks at some of the best you can t...

2021 was a difficult year for many. That's not to say that 2020 was any better, but for some reason, perhaps due to the "naivety" of the whole situation, it felt... "different". I certainly felt more prepared and willing to face new challenges and to learn how to adapt. Either way, I spent a long period of the 2020/2021 winter lockdowns trying to be as supportive and as positive to those around me as possible. I was active in online communities, helped friends and others out, supported them th...