2024/03/19A Commentary on Defining Observability Recently, Hazel Weakly has published a great article titled Redefining Observability. In it, she covers competing classical definitions observability, weaknesses they have, and offers a practical reframing of the concept in the context of software organizations (well, not only software organizations, but the examples tilt that way). I agree with her post in most ways, and so this blog post of mine is more of an improv-like “yes, and…” response to it, in which I also try to frame the many existing models as complementary or contrasting perspectiv ..read more

Welcome to our series of case studies about companies using Elixir in production. Veeps is a streaming service that offers direct access to live and on-demand events by award-winning artists at the most iconic venues. Founded in 2018, it became part of Live Nation Entertainment in 2021. Veeps have been named one of the ten most innovative companies in music and nominated for an Emmy. They currently hold the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest ticketed livestream by a solo male artist—a performance where Elixir and Phoenix played an important role in the backend during the streaming ..read more

OTP 27.0-rc1 Erlang/OTP 27.0-rc1 is the first release candidate of three before the OTP 27.0 release. The intention with this release is to get feedback from our users. All feedback is welcome, even if it is only to say that it works for you. We encourage users to try it out and give us feedback either by creating an issue at https://github.com/erlang/otp/issues or by posting to Erlang Forums. All artifacts for the release can be downloaded from the Erlang/OTP Github release and you can view the new documentation at https://erlang.org/documentation/doc-15.0-rc1/doc. You can also install the la ..read more

2024/01/26Counting Forest Fires Today I'm hitting my 3 years mark at Honeycomb, and so I thought I'd re-publish one of my favorite short blog posts written over there, Counting Forest Fires, which has become my go-to argument when discussing incident metrics when asked to count outages and incidents. If you were asked to evaluate how good crews were at fighting forest fires, what metric would you use? Would you consider it a regression on your firefighters' part if you had more fires this year than the last? Would the size and impact of a forest fire be a measure of their success? Would you lo ..read more

Elixir v1.16 has just been released. ? The Elixir team continues improving the developer experience via tooling, documentation, and precise feedback, while keeping the language stable and compatible. The notable improvements in this release are the addition of compiler diagnostics and extensive improvements to our docs in the forms of guides, anti-patterns, diagrams and more. Code snippets in diagnostics Elixir v1.15 introduced a new compiler diagnostic format and the ability to print multiple error diagnostics per compilation (in addition to multiple warnings). With Elixir v1.16, we also incl ..read more

Elixir v1.16 has just been released. ? The Elixir team continues improving the developer experience via tooling, documentation, and precise feedback, while keeping the language stable and compatible. The notable improvements in this release are the addition of compiler diagnostics and extensive improvements to our docs in the forms of guides, anti-patterns, diagrams and more. Code snippets in diagnostics Elixir v1.15 introduced a new compiler diagnostic format and the ability to print multiple error diagnostics per compilation (in addition to multiple warnings). With Elixir v1.16, we also incl ..read more

2023/12/21Negotiable Abstractions When I used to write more software and do more architecture professionally (I still do, but less intensively so with the SRE title), one of the most important questions I'd seek answers to was "how do I cut this up?" Or more accurately, "how do I cut this up without it coming back to haunt me later?" My favorite guideline was to write code that is easy to delete, not code that is easy to maintain; Tef wrote about this more eloquently than I ever did. I long ago gave up on the idea of writing maintainable code rather than code that was articulated in the right ..read more

It seemed like functional programming got a boost back in the mid to late 2010s when Elixir started gaining in popularity. I, for one, had my entire professional outlook turned inside out by getting to know this language and the underlying BEAM runtime and OTP framework. I couldn&apost understand why we hadn&apost always worked this way. I didn&apost understand why OTP and frameworks like it weren&apost the norm! I began to understand, however, why functional programming people tend to be ... passionate functional programming people. Now you might be wondering if the title is ..read more

Telemetry is an Erlang library for dynamically dispatching events to event handlers. Telemetry event data typically ends up in logs or metric databases like Prometheus. With the Telemetry library any code can emit a telemetry event with telemetry:execute/3, and any function be registered as an event handler and get invoked when the event occurs. Events are identified by name. A name or list of names must be specified when registering a handler using the telemetry:attach/4 and telemetry:attach_many/4 functions. The Problem Telemetry is widely used and many popular Erlang and Elixir packa ..read more

OTP 26.1 Erlang/OTP 26.1 is the first maintenance patch package for OTP 26, with mostly bug fixes as well as improvements. For details about bugfixes and potential incompatibilities see the Erlang 26.1 README The Erlang/OTP source can also be found at GitHub on the official Erlang repository, https://github.com/erlang/otp Download links for this and previous versions are found here https://www.erlang.org/downloads ..read more