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Your Pi-Hole Is a Rich Source of Data

While a lot of my inspiration for blog posts come from talking with New Relic users, it's hard to share them as examples because their so specific and often confidential. So I find myself struggling more to find a generic "for instance" that's easy to understand and accessible to all everyone.

Which should explain why I use my home environment as the sample use case so often. Even if you don't have exactly the same gear or setup I do, it's likely you have something analogous. On top of that, if you don't have the specific element I'm discussing, many times I believe it's something you ought to consider.

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Mind the Gap

Recently, I posted a tutorial on how I monitored my Raspberry-pi based "pihole" server using New Relic and Flex.

Like many tutorials, what you read there is the end result, a narrative of the perfect execution of a well-conceived idea where all steps and variables are foreseen beforehand.

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Develop a Sense of Code

The more the counter next to my years-in-tech metric increments upward, the more I find myself in situations where I talk about career paths, skill decisions, and choices about specializations. It might be talking to a publication, on a panel, or one-on-one with someone who wants to get into or ahead in IT.

One of the questions that come up a lot is something like, "Are we at the point where everyone in IT needs to learn to code?"

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Everything I Needed to Know About Observability, I Learned from ‘Bewitched’

Recently, I was asked to write an article on "How to Convince your Boss to Prioritize Observability." You can read it here). As I was pulling it together, one particular sentence sent me down the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

My original draft included a line that mentioned “winning the big _____ account.” My thought was to reference the famous account from the TV show Bewitched that Darren and his partner Larry were always trying to win.

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Who Are We Helping?

It’s hard to deny the truth that for a lot of us “difficult” means “good,” and “more difficult” is “even better.” From video games to exercise to music to cooking, if someone accomplishes something perceived as hard to do, it’s a clear indication of their skill. Conversely, saying something is easy or simple is often a veiled insult, an insinuation that anyone could do it and therefore the thing is therefore barely worth acknowledging.

And, while I don’t want to discount the system upon which so much of our leisure activities are based, I think this is a lesson we in IT have taken too much to heart. I’m writing today to ask us to all consider shifting our thinking in the direction of “easy can also be good.” In fact, things which are easy are often better overall than things that require a greater level of individual virtuosity.

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Making the Case for Observability to Your Boss

One of the things the other developer relations advocates here at New Relic and I often hear from customers is, "Even though I understand why observability is important, I'm having a dickens* of a time getting leadership to buy in (literally)."

Let me begin by pointing out how important it is for us — IT practitioners — to be willing and able to speak to management and leaders of the business about the work we do, and to do so in a way that is understandable and meaningful to the audience. I'm not implying you have to explain observability in a patronizing "explain it like they're five" kind of way. I mean you need to explain the WHY of observability in the context of what the audience feels is important.