I have a project, codenamed Ox currently, that has been consuming me for the past seven years.

I have hit a block. Not a writing block, not per-se. More of a mental staircase of ascending excuses. I just can’t make things anymore for myself.

There was recently a discussion on Hacker News around application logging on a budget. At work I’ve been trying to keep things lean, not to the point of absurdity, but also not using a $100 or $1000/month setup, when a $10 one will suffice for now. We settled on a homegrown Clickhouse + PHP solution that has performed admirably for two years now. Like everything, this is all about tradeoffs, so here’s a top-level breakdown of how Clog (Clickhouse + Log) works.

It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve released code to the open web. In fast, the only contributions I’ve done in the last 5 years have been to Chakra and a few other OSS libraries. So, in an attempt to try something new, I recently delved into the world anew.

Several years ago, I inherited a legacy application. It had multiple parts all logging back to a central ELK stack that had later been supplemented by additional Prometheus metrics. And every morning, I would wake up to a dozen alerts.

Many, many years ago I was an avid reader and writer of various fiction writing websites. There’s still links to them on this site, which shows a. how long they’ve been around and b. how out of date this site is. Recently I’ve been on a bit of binge, revisiting my past and re-reading these old stories. Which led me to a quest.