I come from a world where strategy is best kept secret. Whether it be from a company who has a codename for literally everything, or the competitive culture of playing and coaching D1 athletics, confidentiality became a required skill. Meetings, trainings, code reviews, scouting reports… anything of significance happened behind closed doors. In other words, definitely not open source.

Errors. We all cause them all the time, which can make it difficult to figure out the person or team who should be responsible for fixing individual issues. Time that could be spent resolving an issue is instead spent tracking down who should be handling it and what it’s even about. This is a waste. It balloons time to resolution, often from minutes to hours or sometimes even days.

Every single app — large or small, open source or not — has room for improvement when it comes to performance. This is why we created Skylight for Open Source to give open source contributors the tools they need to find these issues. Over the next week, we'll show you three different open source apps running on Skylight, each with their own unique performance challenges, varying in complexity.

Having worked closely with software developers for almost a decade, I’ve noticed some common traits amongst them. Technically minded people think about problems in different ways. I’m often stunned how I could miss such an obvious data point or edge case when discussing product changes with people who have a far greater technical mind than myself.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved building businesses. Ideas have always come naturally to me, and over the years I have honed my skills at actually making those ideas a reality. I recall one of my first businesses at about 12 or 13 years old, designing nicer looking versions of property data sheets for real estate agents to give out to prospective buyers. My most recent profitable business is StatusGator, a status page monitoring and alerting service.

Opinions vary in recent online discussions regarding systems and software observability. Some state that observability is a replacement for monitoring. Others that they are parallel mechanisms, or that one is a subset of another (not to mention where tracing fits into such a hierarchy). Monitoring Weekly recently provided a helpful list of resources for an overview of this discussion, as well as some practical applications of observability.

Application performance monitoring (APM) has become one of the key strategies adopted by IT teams and application owners in today’s era of digital business services. Application downtime has always been considered adverse to business productivity. But in today’s digital economy, what is becoming equally dreadful is application slowdown.