Ken Finnigan

Hello BlueSky! On Monday I am starting a long-running series of threads called #Observability #Animated, in which we dive deep into advanced observability and #OpenTelemetry concepts.

I wrote a new piece yesterday, called "Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob", about my escalating rage at AI-generated text. It includes a framework for thinking about when AI involvement is fine -- just another tool -- and when it lands as a violation. charity.wtf/p/confession...

Is your organisation paying observability prices for monitoring outcomes? That's the question at the centre of my upcoming Masterclass on September 2 for engineering leaders. We'll work through five tests to find out whether that's you, using concrete evidence rather than feelings or suspicion.

Commonhaus welcomes @tuxcare.bsky.social as Silver Sponsor and OSSI Partner tuxcare.com/blog/tuxcare...

Log everything, structure nothing, then can't find what you didn't know to look for. That's the trap last week's Observability Masterclass focused on. @lizthegrey.com built wide events live with OpenTelemetry. On demand now. Next up Aug 19: feedback loops x observability. 🐝 go.hny.co/4wdFfDj

🚀 We've just published the second @opentelemetry.io #Blueprint! This one provides strategic advice for teams aiming to ease adoption of observability best practices in K8s workloads via consistent, efficient, and reliable telemetry platforms. Have a read at opentelemetry.io/docs/guidanc...

hi Irish and UK SRE friends, @honeycomb.io is hiring an SRE in the UK or Ireland! You'll get to work with (IMHO) one of the best SRE teams in the industry, and help level up the rest of industry on o11y and SRE! job-boards.greenhouse.io/honeycomb/jo... job-boards.greenhouse.io/honeycomb/jo...

Does anyone I know work in infosec at IAG or British Airways? I have somehow gained access to someone else's PNR because my email address contact info was put on their reservation, shortly after I updated the email address on my own PNR. I suspect some kind of caching input replay issue.

I'm currently available for consulting work. If you need help with open source strategy, developer relations programs, Kubernetes & cloud native advisory, event programs, or technical content, including podcasts & live streams — let me know! Learn more at shortconsulting.io

Machine Learning Platform Engineering from @manning.com is an incredibly detailed look into all aspects of ML platforms and the their tools: MLflow, Kubeflow, and BentoML. The authors share insights on data analysis, model training, inference and serving, and monitoring. shortener.manning.com/wxr5

Check out this week's o11y newsletter with lots of good OpenTelemetry content and more: o11y.news/2026-02-23/ #observability

@penberg.org's book on Latency with @manning.com is incredibly detailed! Covering latency in all its forms, and real practical approaches to reduce or minimize its impact. Brought me back to writing about event loops for Reactive Java with @cescoffier.bsky.social shortener.manning.com/X1ME

Check out this week's o11y newsletter, with great contributions from OpenTelemetry hands-on articles to a Prometheus storage deep dive: o11y.news/2026-02-16/ #observability

This article shows how to measure RAG behavior, not just generate answers: faithfulness, relevance, grounding, hallucination detection. Built with #Quarkus, #LangChain4j, and local LLMs. Written for #Java devs who ship to production. buff.ly/cLZpGIG #RAG #AIEngineering #LLM

Really enjoyed reading Practical FinOps by Mohamed (lnkd.in/gP4WdrCv) from @manning.com Discusses the FinOps framework and FOCUS in detail. Plenty of practical queries for AWS cost and data tracking! lnkd.in/g4P-aVr5

Migrating from #Fluentd to the OpenTelemetry Collector? Fluentd buffers to disk. The Collector defaults to memory - so a pod restart can mean lost #logging data. Here’s how to configure #OpenTelemetry persistent queues safely. 👉 dash0.link/otel-fluent-...

Hey. I don't know who needs to hear this. It's gonna be okay. We will get through this. This is, sadly, cyclical in human society. And we've always been okay. Eventually. It's okay to be afraid. To take a break to recharge. You can't pour from an empty cup. Please care for yourself. Hold on.

The #RootsTech schedule is live. I’ve just created my own schedule of talks I want to watch. I will be attending online #NotAtRootsRech

I made a substack: charitydotwtf.substack.com. Some people questioned the ethics of doing so, so I put the project on hold for a few days to think and ask questions. I have decided to stay. Here is why. (also xpost: charity.wtf/2025/12/19/h...) charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/hello-worl...

Transformers in Action (shortener.manning.com/JdAP) is an excellent resource for learning how various transformer models work, how to specialize and train models, and ethical LLMs. Thanks to Nicole Königstein for this @manning.com book! It's a great read

putting this out there - anyone know someone or have recs for leadership coaches that specialize in tech + autism/adhd?

Check out this week's o11y newsletter with great content from OpenTelemetry to OpenSearch: o11y.news/2025-12-01/ #observability

You will hear of launches and rumors of launches—but here's how to test Gemini 3 yourself. Pick one stubborn document or photo. Run it through our #genealogy research-tuned Gem today (Gemini 2.5). Save everything. When G3 lands, rerun the exact same prompts. If it's real, you'll feel the difference.

Check out this week's o11y newsletter with great news on OpenTelemetry releases to instrumentation score coming to Prometheus to AIOps and more: o11y.news/2025-11-17/ #observability

Current progress of McLaren P1 LEGO. By far the most complex and intricate set I’ve ever built!

Hi everyone! An ongoing reorganization at my current employer has prompted me to seek for a new role and would appreciate your support. I'm open to remote (anywhere) and hybrid roles in Switzerland. I have 25+ years experience as a software developer, 8 as devrel www.linkedin.com/posts/aalmir...

Excited to share Part 2, the final article of my research on Secrets of Performance Tuning #Java on #Kubernetes. Your support means a lot! Drop a comment and share your thoughts! www.linkedin.com/pulse/secret...

Come and see what we cooked up! #Observability #MagicTheGathering #OpenTelemetry

That's a wrap for #NODES2025! Our 7th edition brought together an incredible global graph community! 24-hour streaming 160 talks from 200 speakers from all over the world. Soon: all talks will be available on our YouTube channel (you can already watch some! https://bit.ly/43WU14G) THANK YOU!

Check out this week's o11y newsletter with excellent contribs from non-pillars to new instrumentation method and OpenTelemetry material: o11y.news/2025-11-03/ #observability

Just realized I haven't announced this here yet - The 9th edition of my book "Java in a Nutshell" will be published by O'Reilly in 2026. Watch this space for an announcement of early access. #java #programming

Had a great weekend in London catching up with friends! Now at Heathrow, and excited to get home and see the family

Check out this week's o11y newsletter with a range of good things from practitioners sharing insights to OTel reference material to new tooling: o11y.news/2025-10-13/ #observability

Dash0 raises $35M #SeriesA!🚀 #Observability is too noisy, complex & expensive. We started Dash0 to fix that - and 300+ customers joined us. Now we’ve raised $35M in Series A led by Accel & Cherry Ventures, with DIG Ventures. Thanks to our investors & angels for the support! 👉 dash0.link/series-a

QCon San Francisco 2025: Full Schedule Available 🚀 6 weeks to go! 90+ speakers, 12 tracks, proven patterns from senior practitioners. Keynotes include: Nicole Forsgren on DevEx, "Hidden Decisions" by Shawna Martell & Dan Fike, plus AI engineering & leadership tracks. 🔗 bit.ly/3IGltgS #QConSF

I’ll be visiting London from 9-14 Oct if anyone I know would like to catch up. Look forward to being back in blighty!

in other news, my upcoming trip to the UK is likely to be my last for quite some time. so do get in touch with our sales team if you'd like to have me give a talk in-person in London first two weeks of Oct, before rules shift from you *may* let me use the loo, to you *must not* let me use the loo.

#RootsTech Registration is now open for 2026! Attend this incredible conference on March 5-7, 2026 in Salt Lake City, UT. Register at familysearch.org/en/rootstech/ Attending from home and register for #FREE at familysearch.org/en/rootstech/ #FamilySearch #genealogy #familyhistory

🚀 Dash0 #SyntheticMonitoring is now GA! Check your APIs from around the world, catch #SSL issues early, and see instantly if errors come from #syntheticchecks or real users, all deeply integrated with Dash0 #tracing & #triage. 👉 Discover more: dash0.link/-synthetic-m...

Yup. Nothing odd going on here at all. Gah.

Are you an experienced software buyer? I could use your help. I'm working on the second edition of "Observability Engineering", and hoping to include the kind of advice an experienced principal engineer might give a staff engineer buying for the first time. charity.wtf/2025/09/19/a...

📢 Microsoft is hiring a Senior Compiler Engineer to work on the #JVM! If you have strong compiler / codegen / optimization skills, this could be your next big challenge. Want a referral? Send me a DM. #Hiring #CompilerEngineering #Systems #Microsoft #Java #OpenJDK #Java25

Gradle is sponsoring the Commonhaus Foundation with a shared Develocity instance, giving open source projects observability, faster builds, test acceleration, and troubleshooting tools to improve productivity and long-term sustainability. www.commonhaus.org/activity/277...

Check out this week's o11y newsletter with great OpenTelemetry practices and recommendations: o11y.news/2025-09-08/ #observability

Archaeologists find remains of Isaac Newton's mother's 17th-century house | Fox News share.google/6AoH8ZRhzdbz...