austin

if i have to read one more piece of generated text i will kms

there are approximately three good reasons to generate text that another human being will read.

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how I use claude code

jan 26 edition

ai ui ei ei o

thoughts on user experience in a nondeterministic world

radical ai centrism

towards being normal

important poll

let your voice be heard

pareto agents

how can something that fails 20% of the time succeed?

digital shop class

a modest proposal to improve internet civics

notes on sonnet 4.5

Reflection, September 2025

I'm tired.

The Future Of Software Is Small

The dominance of SaaS platforms in business and pleasure today is a cyclic one. If you went back in time to the 1980's and told them that 21% of the industry was using the same CRM platform they'd pro…

The Future Of Software Is Small

Everyone Is Wrong, All The Time.

Much has been written about the nature of large language models to hallucinate. In a stunning victory for linguistic determinism, we've decided that this means that LLM output is somehow 'wrong'. I wo…

Everyone Is Wrong, All The Time.

JSON Is The Wrong Content Type For LLM Inputs.

JSON Is The Wrong Content Type For LLM Inputs.

This isn't an exhaustive or fully baked idea yet, but I've been noticing a trend with MCP servers -- they love to just yeet a bunch of JSON at an LLM. I think this is well-intentioned but not super op…

I Set Up My iPad Again, Please Clap.

I feel like every few years I go through a "hm, i could probably just use an ipad for most things" so I spent today getting it set back up. Will it work this time? No clue! The iPad is, like, 75% of w…

I Set Up My iPad Again, Please Clap.

Wide Events, Personal Software, and You.

I recently built a fun little project called 777-BSKY. It looks at Bluesky trending topics, does some math, figures out what's most popular and slaps some TTS on it. You can call a phone number and ha…

Wide Events, Personal Software, and You.

Introducing locol

The best projects to work on are the ones that scratch a few different itches at once. I've wanted to write a native macOS application for years now, but I've always found building GUIs to be tedious …

Introducing locol

One Weird Trick

One Weird Trick

I was reading Mike Masnick's piece in TechDirt the other day where he discusses tech optimism in the face of, well, everything that's going on in the world right now. I don't really want to bore you w…

a good post

The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry

I recently presented a talk at Monitorama 2024 titled 'The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry'. The slides for that talk are available at https://austinlparker.github.io/monitorama-2024.

The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry

Re-Redefining Observability

This post is a response/companion to Hazel Weakly's excellent 'Redefining Observability'. You should probably read it first, and perhaps Fred Hebert's commentary on it, 'A Commentary on Defining Obser…

Re-Redefining Observability

Don't Work For Projects That Don't Have Open Governance

Don't Work For Projects That Don't Have Open Governance

I'm going to weigh in on the Redis thing.

Regrets of a Technical Communicator

Regrets of a Technical Communicator

I like to joke that I got into developer relations because I was the rare programmer that could carry on a conversation for more than five minutes. Like all good jokes, its mostly true -- I think one …

Lessons Learned from Learning OpenTelemetry

I'm knee-deep in production for Learning OpenTelemetry, releasing in just over a month. This is my second book, so I figured it was a good time to sit down and write up a couple of things I learned wh…

Lessons Learned from Learning OpenTelemetry

What Do We Mean When We Talk About OpenTelemetry?

What Do We Mean When We Talk About OpenTelemetry?

I'm motivated to write this post as a result of several discussions I've had over the past week or so prompted in part by the announcement of Elastic wanting to donate their profiling agent to the Ope…

OTel TIL - What The Heck Is Instrumentation, Anyway?

OTel TIL - What The Heck Is Instrumentation, Anyway?

Ever asked ChatGPT about OpenTelemetry? There's a pretty good chance that what it spits out at you started out as something I wrote, years ago. When the project started, I picked up where I left off m…

Telemetry Ergonomics

I used to joke that there were maybe fifty people on the planet that really cared about 'observability' at a philosophical level, and I still maintain that I'm mostly correct. Maybe you're one of them…

Telemetry Ergonomics

Selling The Vision

OpenTelemetry can be a difficult project to describe to people, because the gap between what it is today and what it will be tomorrow is very large. It's easy to stare at it from a distance, squint yo…

Selling The Vision

Parsing Apache2 access logs with the OpenTelemetry Collector

Parsing Apache2 access logs with the OpenTelemetry Collector

I couldn't find a ton of resources on this, but FYI -- the OpenTelemetry Collector's filelog receiver has a pretty robust regex parser built into it. Want to get your access.log files from Apache? Her…

Data Bores

Sampling is a method to reduce the volume of data processed and stored by observability tools. There’s a variety of methods and algorithms that can be employed to do this, and most observability pract…

Data Bores

Deploying on Friday the 13th

“I wasn’t trained to do that.”

Deploying on Friday the 13th

Observability Cannot Fail, It Can Only Be Failed

Being between jobs is a great time to step back, do some self-critique, and engage in light home improvement for fun and or profit. It’s this last pursuit that’s convinced me that if this whole comput…

Observability Cannot Fail, It Can Only Be Failed

Observability and the Decentralized Web

Observability and the Decentralized Web

It's probably still too early to write the obituary for centralized social media and 'Web 2.0' — but if you squint, you can see it on the horizon. Ongoing regulatory pressures and the slow burn of Twi…

The Blockchain Haters Guide To The AT Protocol

The Blockchain Haters Guide To The AT Protocol

Like several of the tech twitterati, I've recently been going goblin mode over at Bluesky, a federated social network in private beta. As a long-time crypto and blockchain skeptic, I decided to take a…

Stop Trying To Make Observability Happen

Stop Trying To Make Observability Happen

Virtual Events Are Dead, Long Live Virtual Events

Virtual Events Are Dead, Long Live Virtual Events

By any scientific metric, the risk of COVID-19 infection is greater than it's ever been, while mitigation efforts have regressed to a shrugging emoji. Being offered an alcohol wipe by a smiling, unmas…

Incentives and Power

I wrote a post a little while ago about how SRE is really just sneaky anarchism, and this is somewhat of a followup.

Incentives and Power

The Commodification of DevOps

The Commodification of DevOps

It's been quipped more than once that most amazing Silicon Valley innovations are simply a bunch of nerds poorly recreating a service that already exists, but with an app. While I find this to be in s…

Deserted Island DevOps Postmortem

In my experience, it’s the ideas that you don’t expect to work that really take off. When I registered a domain name a month ago for Deserted Island DevOps, I can say pretty confidently that I didn’t …

Deserted Island DevOps Postmortem

Mono in Debian 9 Containers

Mono in Debian 9 Containers

Running Debian 9 and need to install the mono repository? You'll find advice for 8 that suggests using the following:

OpenTracing for ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI

Preface - I really like what Microsoft is doing with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.

OpenTracing for ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI