Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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Softwaredynamics

This is a master class for building mechanical empathy for software across the CPU and network: I'd learned some of the descriptions here the hard way, adding notes for everything that was new and fascinating.

• Piecewise linear graphs: observability metrics often have very different scales and are interesting in different parts: change the scale of the x axis while keeping each part linear separately to have both information density and build intuition around what's going on.
• Summarising interval calculations: a common mechanism for instrumentation is to capture metrics per interval e.g. a minute and publish them: aggregating metrics across intervals to give real time values always gives me a headache -- to the point I personally just plot data per minute instead. But relying on some averaging or combining the current partial interval with the previous complete one can smooth out the data and make it much easier to work with.

— Kunal