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Notes on engineering, product, growth, and what actually happens when you build and sell software. Subscribe via RSS.
- Best APM for Go Services Go has no runtime monkey-patching, so real auto-instrumentation needs eBPF. The three options, plus pprof, goroutine leaks, GC metrics and context propagation.
- Best APM for Java and Spring Boot How -javaagent bytecode instrumentation works, what GC and pool dashboards should show, and which APM tools handle Spring Boot and legacy app servers.
- Why I finally built a website of my own After sixteen years of writing on other people’s platforms, a place I actually control.
- Best APM for Node.js Applications How Node APM agents really work: require patching, ESM loader hooks, AsyncLocalStorage, event loop lag, worker threads and source maps — and which tool to pick.
- Best APM for Python, Django and FastAPI WSGI vs ASGI instrumentation, gunicorn fork failures, Celery context breaks, Django N+1 detection, the GIL and CPU metrics — and which Python APM to pick.
- Datadog vs New Relic vs Dynatrace How the three big APM platforms actually differ — integration breadth, consolidated billing, and automatic dependency discovery — and which one fits your team.
- Grafana Cloud vs Datadog This is a lock-in decision, not a feature comparison. What open standards buy you, what Datadog polish buys you, and the engineering hours each path costs.
- Datadog Alternatives Teams leave Datadog for three different reasons, and each one points at a different replacement. Segment by your reason before you shortlist anything.
- New Relic Alternatives Why teams leave consumption-based, per-user APM pricing, which replacements fit which motivation, and what breaks when you split one platform into three tools.
- Best Open Source APM and Observability Tools How the genuinely open observability projects differ on storage architecture, what sits behind the open-core wall, and what running them actually costs in engineer hours.
- Best Self-Hosted Observability Stacks How to assemble Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and Grafana into a working stack, size the storage, survive cardinality, and decide who gets paged when monitoring breaks.
- Best APM Tools for Enterprise Enterprise APM is a procurement decision: SSO, RBAC, data residency, audit logs, on-prem options and support SLAs eliminate most vendors before features matter.
- Best Free APM Tools and What the Free Tier Really Costs The honest anatomy of an APM free tier: retention windows, cardinality caps, forced sampling, seat limits, and what gets silently dropped before you see it.
- Best APM Tools for Startups What a startup actually needs from APM: fast time to first value, a free tier that survives growth, and knowing exactly which metric triggers the bill jump.
- Best APM Tools for Developers A category map of APM and observability tools, what OpenTelemetry changed about vendor lock-in, why pricing units make comparison hard, and a decision tree.
- Eleven years at one company, junior developer to VP What actually compounds when you stay somewhere long enough to live with your own decisions.