This is an experience report for my future reference (and yours). The OpenTelemetry Collector is useful for receiving trace data in whatever format and exporting it to the back-end of your choice for storage and querying. For instance, I wanted to receive traces over HTTP/JSON from this sneaky browser extensionLINK and send them to Honeycomb. … Read moreRun an OpenTelemetry Collector locally in Docker
Sometimes the obvious, default API is never what you want. That’s when you have to memorize the “do things right” flag. For yargs, the command-line argument parser for Node.js, specify options and subcommands like this: There. Next time I can cut and paste this instead of scouring the internet for how to make yargs do … Read moreyargs –do-things-right
If you want secure code, or code with fewer bugs, you want to track the kind of data you’re passing around. In your code, do not pass around strings or any other built-in built-in primitive type. Those are for the edges: we have to accept strings as input, we have to write VARCHAR to the … Read moreSpring and JPA: use custom value types inside entities with a custom converter
I like this enough that I’m putting it here for reference. If anyone tells me how to improve it, I’ll update it here. The goal is to get some text to have a blurry white background behind it, like this text here. That’s especially useful when there’s an image behind it. Look! A CSS custom … Read moreFuzzy translucent background behind text in CSS
(this is my TL;DR from Karl Popper’s Three Worlds model) World 1: the physical world. This includes all material objects, light, magnetic fields, the universe. We all share one physical world, although each of us sees a tiny slice of it. World 2: human experience. Feelings, emotions, the way it is to be in your … Read morePopper’s Three Worlds
When I’m developing on a Spring Boot app, I want to see when a request comes in, how it was authenticated, and where it was handled. By default, log levels are set to INFO. Nothing prints per-request. I don’t know a good way to get the information I need, so I turn them way up: … Read moreSpring Boot log levels for development
^ that’s what I googled, so that’s the title of the blog post that solves it. When I added spring-boot-starter-security to my dependencies, I expected my whole app to suddenly be behind a login screen. But I expected it to work after logging in. Instead, it failed at the first form submission. And it failed … Read moreI turned on Spring Security and my POSTs don’t work anymore
In Spring Boot example apps, H2 is the easiest database to get started with. Its data is in memory or in a local file. When the app is running in development mode, you can access the database at /h2-console. It gives you a lovely little SQL admin app. That is, after you turn it on … Read moreSpring Security for h2-console
In our Rails app, installing the Honeycomb beeline magically gave us traces of all HTTP requests, with dozens of useful fields like ‘request.path’ and ‘response.status_code’. I really wanted the request verb (GET or POST) and I couldn’t find that. (It’s there, in ‘request.method’, I missed it. But still, it’s useful to know how to a … Read moreAdding custom fields to Honeycomb traces in Rails by writing a Rack middleware
so I can find them here later: Fast-forward merge Some people like to git pull, but I never do. That brings new stuff from origin and then merges. I always do these do steps separately: git fetch and then either merge or rebase. The easy case, when I don’t have any local-only commits, is to … Read moreJessitron’s favorite git aliases