My talk was accepted by SpringOne in San Francisco. I never went to that conference and was really looking forward to it. This year would probably be amazing with the Spring 6.0 and Spring Boot 3.0 releases. So many groundbreaking changes. Unfortunately, my travel budget at Lightrun was cut, and…

The good, the bad, and the worse — I recently gave a talk about debugging for the London Java Community. During the Q&A part of the talk, someone asked me about my approach to Test Driven Development. In the past I looked at that practice in a more positive light. Writing lots of tests. …

Before I get into the subject of this week’s post I have other great news. I just sent the last (14th) chapter to the publisher for my upcoming debugging book titled: “Practical Debugging at Scale. Cloud Native Debugging in Kubernetes and Production”. It’s been fun to write and I hope…

This is a shocker… I just switched laptops, I thought I was downgrading from the “top of the line” M1 Max with 64gb (14.1 inch version) to a “tiny” MacBook Air M2 with “only” 24gb of RAM. Turns out I was wrong. The new M2 seems to be noticeably faster…

Doubt isn’t fun. We want to have confidence in our direction and doubt is most powerful just when we need the courage to move. When we don’t have the right amount of experience. But in a different light doubt is caution. An important guardrail against our inherent risk taking.

Is API mocking in unit tests important, or does it do nothing? The answer is a bit more nuanced, but we do need such tests to reduce churn — I love contradictions where both states of truth can work simultaneously. Case in point, this tweet about mocking from the other week:

60% of security breaches are internal to the organization and yet when we think about security we usually think about vulnerabilities, exploits, etc. All the while, 60% of hacks are just from a person just logging into the system and taking whatever the hell they want. I’ve been thinking about…

I discussed tracepoints quite a bit in my blog and videos. They are wonderful, but I feel the nuance of non-breaking is a bit lost. The true power of this amazing tool is hidden due to our debugging habits and our preconceived notions about debugging. It’s indeed difficult to make…

To leverage observability, we need a significant shift in our corporate culture that encapsulates the entire company and goes beyond tools — I’m guilty of applying the word “debugging” to practically anything. My kids’ legos won’t fit, let’s debug that. Observability is one of the few disciplines that actually warrant that moniker; it is debugging. But traditional debugging doesn’t really fit with observability practices. I usually call it “precognitive debugging.” …