November

I am back from my 40 day sabbatical in New Zealand. In Some notes on New Zealand I wrote about a few random things that stood out to me but the best story of New Zealand is told by photos. It’s a magnificent country with wonderful people, I wouldn’t mind living there weren’t it so far from pretty much everything.

Reading

All you need is Wide Events, not “Metrics, Logs and Traces” by Ivan Burmistrov reminded me of Canonical Log Lines 2.0 by Brandur. At SumUp we heavily rely on Open Telemetry but articles such as the above make me want to try and experiment with different approaches. One common painpoint we observe with many teams is the usage of logs. In many cases teams leave everything on info level even in production which results in verbose logs that don’t provide enough useful information to justify their existence and often run into the risk of leaking sensitive data. Furthermore, navigating between different signals (logs, traces, and metrics) is hard unless your company has a strong and enforced guidelines for common attributes (not our case unfortunately).¹

The 2024 United States presidential election is over and people in my little online bubble had a lot to say (rightfully so). Molly White’s Wind the clock rejects the defeatism and focuses on action anyone can take to fight for the press freedom, access to information, and migrant and reproductive rights. In the same vein, Electronic Frontier Foundation pledged “to ensure that technology serves you—rather than silencing, tracking, or oppressing you—does not change” in their The 2024 U.S. Election is Over. EFF is Ready for What’s Next.. Another read-worthy posts include America, the final season and Pluralistic: Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification.

Observing, even from the safe haven of Europe, one can’t help but feel sad about the lost values, progress thrown away, and the degradation of baseline of what strong leaders should be. David Brooks’s The Road to Character talks about selfless heroes in our history and I wish USA gets back to having their president worth the list.

The ultra-selfish gene by Mathias Kirk Bonde in the Work in Progress news reminded me of The Gene for which I still didn’t finish a write up.

Listening

Viktor Sheen released new album titled Impostor syndrom; as always, the songs are hit or miss with hits frequently ranking in the top 3 of my Spotify yearly recap.

Watching

The 8th longest flight in the world from Auckland to Dubai provides just enough time (17 hours and 25 minutes to be exact) to rewatch the Lord of the Rings trilogy in extended edition. Unfortunately, Emirate’s onboard entertainment had only the theatrical release which had to do. Next month I am flying to Brazil (12 hours to São Paulo) which leaves me with the only other thing on worth re-watching list - Band of Brothers.