For reasons that should be abundantly clear, I’ve been poking at alternatives to Elasticsearch. I’m living in a mostly Rust-based ecosystem right now working on Vector, so I started looking within that world. I found Sonic and decided to give it a whirl. Sonic is a “fast, lightweight, and schema-less search backend.” It’s written in Rust, licensed under MPL 2.0. It’s maintained by Valerian Saliou, who is one of the founders of Crisp.

I put this mind map together a few years ago after a discussion about what a new VP of Engineering or CTO should think about in their first 90 days in a new role. It’s a map of the areas I believe every new technical leader needs to, at least, think about and explore when starting at a new organization. I’ve divided the map into four major domains: Company Product Technical Humans Not every item on the map is relevant to every organization, at least not at every stage of evolution.

I build a lot of demos and prototypes. I often have the need to build a back-end API service quickly for these examples. To do this I use JSON server. JSON Server allows me to create a functional REST-ful API without writing any code. Installing JSON Server Let’s take a quick look how it works, starting with installing JSON Server. JSON Server is available as a NPM package and can be installed globally.

I’m always looking at new monitoring and logging tools. I’ve written some books on logging and some that feature logging as part of broader monitoring frameworks. Recently I’ve been playing around with Vector. Vector describes itself as an observability tool, specifically a “data router”, but has a heavy focus on logs as data sources, although it also supports metrics and has indicated tracing data is a future ambition. The Vector team see it as a replacement for Logstash, Telegraf, Fluent et al but warn that it is not a distributed stream processing tool (or a replacement for Kafka!

I’ve been playing with a lot of development work flow tools over the last few weeks. I was an early adopter of Docker and have always been passionate about reducing friction in the development process, especially locally. Quick performance wins for individual developers add up to substantial productivity improvements across a whole team. I’ve been interested in how these tools are evolving, as we expand beyond the basic tools Docker provided with containers.