Here’s what I know so far, from a lay-developer’s perspective (no AI or ML experience). So you’re a coder, and you’ve been asked to integrate with ChatGPT. What do you need to know? ChatGPT is an example of a Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs are a kind of machine learning (call it AI if you …
Read moreA Developer’s Starting Point for Integrating with LLMs
Check this out, I have a chapter in this free mini-book: https://landing.confluxhq.com/optimising-fast-flow This came out of a talk at QCon London… the in-person version was better, but they don’t record them anymore.
For years, I’ve been wishing I had Honeycomb events for pageviews on my web site. But doing that in WordPress is hard, it probably involves PHP, and I don’t have time to dive into that world. Forget diving; I can dip my toe into it with the help of ChatGPT. With its help, I got …
Have you ever looked at someone else’s Honeycomb query and thought “what’s up with ‘trace.parent_id does not exist’? Or wondered how Honeycomb’s home screen counts Total Requests? This is totally confusing. Here, I made a video about how to do it and why it works like that.
TL;DR: Run the OpenTelemetry Collector helm chart with –values=values.yaml pointing to the values.yaml in this gist. Use kubectl get services to find the collector’s URL. The rest of this blog post walks through the whole process of setting this up. This will teach you the why and how of each step, so that you can adjust it to your needs. There’s also …
Read moreRun the OpenTelemetry Collector in Kubernetes for Front-End Tracing
Are we succeeding as a software team?Well, if our job were feature delivery, we could look at the parade of JIRA tickets in our “complete” column. That is only part of our job, though.The purpose of a software team is to provide valued capabilities to customers, internal or external. To do that, our software has …
Read moreFive Measurements You Should Make and Then Ignore (Plus One to Watch Intently)
TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for the work in the span, and then any spans created during that work will be children of this active span. I’m instrumenting a Node.js app with OpenTelemetry, and adding some …
Today, I found a bug before I noticed it. Like, it was subtle, and so I wasn’t quite sure I saw it–maybe I hadn’t hit refresh yet? Later, I looked at the trace of my function and boom, there was a clear bug. Here’s the function with the bug. It responds to a request to …
What is happening in production? Distributed tracing can help you find out. But it’s one thing to instrument, another to use it. Here’s a short (6m) video that asks “Why is this so slow?” See three quick ways to get answers in Honeycomb. If you want to follow along and play with the same data …
Honeycomb made it suuuuuper easy to see traces of HTTP requests hitting my app. Right from my computer! We installed one gem, did one rails generate from a cut-and-paste their dataset creation page gave me. Start up rails server, hit http://localhost:3000, and boom! A thing on a graph in Honeycomb! That was cool. Except, um, …
Read moreHoneycomb in Rails with separate dev and production events