2019 Summary: Up & Running With Serverless and Regaining Blogging Motivation

At the end of the year it’s now become somewhat of a tradition that I partake in the whole year in summary thing. I do find it interesting to read these posts, and I like doing my own since it’s a good way to reflect.

After a year of how-to type blog posts it feels odd, yet fun to be back talking in first person again. Today we’ll cover quite a lot of (varied) ground in a way I wouldn’t typically be comfortable with. But I’m hoping the informality works out. The following are some of the key things I learned in 2019 that I’ll go into more detail on very soon:

  • Serverless technologies require a lot of knowledge, skill and patience
  • Terraform is an amazing technology (and why)
  • Single event logging is an amazing monitoring method (and why)
  • Motivation for blogging is difficult (and how I regained mine)
  • Why I changed the way I run my newsletter (yet it’s still hard)

It seems it’s going to be a pretty detailed post so let’s get to it…

You’re Logging Wrong: What One-Per-Service (“Phat Event”) Logs Are and Why You Need Them.

Common sense says that application logging is a good thing. But common advice doesn’t answer questions like: what to log, when to log, or the format to log, which can get really frustrating especially if you’re looking for precise guidance on to structure your logs. Today, we’re going to change that.

Log Lines To Phat Events

After years of struggling to find a canonical this-is-how-you-should-log advice I came across a concept of: one-per-service logs. But be warned: It’s a heretical idea that challenges common logging advice. But after my own experiments with the one-per-service logging, I’ve found it to have considerable benefits.

By the end of this article you will understand what a one-per-service Phat Event log is and why they can be superior to regular log entries.