Author: John Vester

Web3 moves fast—new concepts or solutions seem to be hyped nearly every month. Some trends catch on—like L2s and NFTs, and some quickly sink into obscurity. A healthy distrust of the hype is good practice, but staying on top of things to understand the truly groundbreaking changes is essential too. 

In this article, I’ll try to help you keep up by highlighting some of the current trends that I think have staying power:

The Gartner hype cycle, illustrated below, can be applied to most Aspects of technology:

As new innovations enter their respective cycles, expectations are eventually realized—leading to some level of adoption. The goal for every innovation is to reach the plateau of productivity where consumers have determined that the reward of adopting the innovation far outweighs any known risks.

In the previous article in this series—The Everything Guide to Data Collection in DevSecOps—we discussed the importance of data collection. In this article, we'll explore the role of monitoring in observability, especially as it relates to security, performance, and reliability. Monitoring is essential for detecting issues and outliers as they happen in production and allows DevSecOps teams to identify and address issues before they cause serious damage. Monitoring performance degradations or suspicious activity can result in alerts and automatic responses to isolate potential problems or attacks.

In this article, we’ll look at monitoring in detail, provide several use cases and best practices, and discuss how monitoring can specifically improve security, performance, and reliability through observability.

Recently, I was thinking about the 1987 movie “Wall Street” and more specifically Michael Douglas’ character, Gordon Gekko. At the time, the 20-year-old version of me who saw the film the night it was released was focused on his college education. I was trying to absorb as much as possible in hopes to extract some educational advantage that could be applied to my Bachelor's degree.

I will always remember Gordon Gekko’s quote: “The most valuable commodity I know of is information.”

Buzzwords aren’t something I expected when I started my career. In those days, most of the technology news arrived in paper-based weekly publications like InformationWeek and Network World. I remember thinking to myself, “Man, they are using these same words over and over again each week.”

That translated to people using buzzwords … all the time. Back then, my two favorite buzzwords were references to the internet as the “world wide web” and the “information superhighway.” I always wondered if there would be a super-duper-highway at some point.

Last year, my wife and I gained the first-time experience of building a brand-new home. The process was fun and exciting, but we also experienced the unexpected internet service interruptions that often accompany new home subdivisions.

While these outages impacted my family’s ability to stream services, such as Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix, I continued working on my current project, due to the intentional design of being able to work in an isolated (or offline) state. This has always been helpful during airline travel when I work from Nevada and Florida during the year.