April — A Confederacy of Dunces

April. A new quarter that started with the revered/reviled (depending on your affinities, and acute sensibilities I suppose??) Fool’s day. What an intriguing custom the 1st of April is. There was a time a tonne of companies and publications would partake in elaborate hoaxes to entertain, as much as shock. Those are far and few in between these days. Makes you wonder in some profound sense, what gives. But let’s not go there.

I found it interesting that different countries have long-standing customs on how they celebrate the 1st of April. For example, in Ukraine, one of the traditions on April Fools' Day is to dress up the main city monument in funny clothes. People walk around the city dressing up in a variety of costumes playing pranks, the day has its own logo et al. Incredible stuff!

Talking about funny clothes and fools and pranks, (and i must admit, this is rather timely) has anyone read, A Confederacy of Dunces? My colleague can’t stop raving about it, and turns out a bunch of my colleagues have read it. Apparently is one of the greatest literary characters created by an author who posthumously won the Pulitzer for his works. Funny how we’re talking about dunces in April, aye? The Matrix is working just dandy, alright?

Interesting stories that caught our attention

• ?Apparently, it takes at least 10-15mins to get back into the?"zone"?after an interruption -?here. I loved this cartoon summing it all up?

• ?Ever heard of?“flow” —?when you’re in a state of being able to hold complex concepts and work in insane pace? There’s a hack on how to get better at it:?Before stepping away, leave the code in a state where it is?Obviously Broken, but?Easy to Fix.?For more -?here
• ?This fantastic find from one of our members in Discord group, which btw, you should be joining.?LINK?— How a water intrusion cascaded to multiple failures of one of Google’s servers -?here
• ?Is there a thing such as ‘The world’s most beautiful calendar’? Apparently there is -?here

From our stables

We witnessed some…well… highs and lows… But, what a hectic April it’s turning out to be managing such insane scale. Oh, just fyi, for context, you should read what April is all about for us —?Cricket Scale.

This got us thinking a lot about High Cardinality problems most folks witness, and are unable to deal with. Piyush explains this in a rather simple tweetstorm -?https://twitter.com/realmeson10/status/1647391069443878912?s=20. For a more detailed, nuanced take, I highly recommend you read this piece on how?Streaming Aggregation?can solve High Cardinality problems.

Last, but not the least, some learnings integrating jmxtrans -?here

Oh, also, call out to the incredible engineering team working on Levitate. We’ve been cranking it this month and this 6-person team has absolutely slayed ??

Oh, before I forget, we have a newsletter featuring ‘A day in the life of an SRE’. Lots of stories from folks and what they’re up to. Do check it out -?here

You can also join our?Discord, where we hang out with like-minded SREs and DevOps folks to discuss all things Observability and Reliability. We call it the?Last9 of Reliability?

What are ya’ll reading these days? Any recommendations for good satire, or historical fiction? Please leave a comment!?