I do this too. I think there’s an opportunity to build some product around this - OCR all your screenshots, make it searchable, also infer context based on the screenshot (i.e. is it a screenshot of Twitter, a blog, a website, etc.) and add those as tags. I’d be interested if something like this exists or if someone is working on something similar!
I’m not aware of anything that will auto-tag like you suggest, but various note taking applications will automatically OCR images to make them searchable. OneNote will do this by default and Obsidian can do this with the “text extractor” plugin. I rely on this heavily for my workflow.
We’re doubling the engineering team in the next month which is obviously very exciting, but daunting. Trying to strike a balance of giving relevant info (tech stack resources, business overview, code layout etc) but not being overwhelming.
Building on-call rotation for alerts
Avenue’s (the company I work for) main product is an alerting tool, and we’re building in tagging to an “on-call”, so I’m starting to think about how to model that internally. Calendaring (or things that are calendar-adjacent) seem to start out so benign and always get complex. Hoping to start with a decent foundation, so my time should be split on data modeling and coding this out.
More interviews!
Being an introvert, this is always a slog, but hey! It’s an exciting time overall.
— Bonus —
If I have time I may redo my personal site a bit – Add a blog section, pare back the design to be more minimal etc.
Description: Avenue’s mission is to help scale the next generation of ops-driven companies. We’re building an observability platform for ops teams (think Sentry/PagerDuty but for ops). We let non-technical teams set up alerts & incident response from their database or data warehouse. We’re backed by Accel, YC, Elad Gil, Flexport, and many others.
This is really cool! Thanks for writing & sharing :)
I’m curious about a couple of things:
How do you recommend actually issuing alerts based on the query? I could imagine having a cron job execute the query and text/email/PagerDuty if there’s an anomaly returned for given period, but I’m wondering if there’s a better existing solution here.
You mentioned at the end there are some tools that provide similar functionality, I’m wondering if you could give a few examples? I know Datadog has great alarm tooling but I would imagine those are less general-purpose than a technique like this.
How do you recommend actually issuing alerts based on the query?
Just like you said. A cron job executing the query at regular intervals and sending an email/text/whatever if it detects an anomaly. I know that there are some reporting tools (I use Redash for example) that have this ability as well.
I’m wondering if you could give a few examples?
I imagine any monitoring tool should have this functionality. Datadog and Scout are two that come to mind.
The main point I wanted to convey in this article is that you set up a pretty descent monitoring system with plain SQL, zero dependencies and no $$$. From my experience, this simple method can go a long way.
We use https://www.anodot.com/ (somewhere in the org). It’s downstream from our metrics gathering that I maintain (Graphite, Prometheus) but supports both AFAIK. I also don’t know if there’s a free/open source version or it’s a paid tool.
Finishing up my application to the Recurse Center. I still have to submit a code snippet, so I’m refactoring the work I did on making Delauney Triangulations out of a set of points and rendering them in-browser (https://triangles.jeffbarg.com/)
Continuing to add features to a Django MVP I’m working on
At work:
Starting to do more work with data pipelines and processing log files. It’ll be fun to finally use some Python at work (my primary language is Java)
P.S. This is my first time posting on this thread :)
Postico is quite nice - https://eggerapps.at/postico2/
I do this too. I think there’s an opportunity to build some product around this - OCR all your screenshots, make it searchable, also infer context based on the screenshot (i.e. is it a screenshot of Twitter, a blog, a website, etc.) and add those as tags. I’d be interested if something like this exists or if someone is working on something similar!
I’m not aware of anything that will auto-tag like you suggest, but various note taking applications will automatically OCR images to make them searchable. OneNote will do this by default and Obsidian can do this with the “text extractor” plugin. I rely on this heavily for my workflow.
Few things!
We’re doubling the engineering team in the next month which is obviously very exciting, but daunting. Trying to strike a balance of giving relevant info (tech stack resources, business overview, code layout etc) but not being overwhelming.
Avenue’s (the company I work for) main product is an alerting tool, and we’re building in tagging to an “on-call”, so I’m starting to think about how to model that internally. Calendaring (or things that are calendar-adjacent) seem to start out so benign and always get complex. Hoping to start with a decent foundation, so my time should be split on data modeling and coding this out.
Being an introvert, this is always a slog, but hey! It’s an exciting time overall.
— Bonus —
If I have time I may redo my personal site a bit – Add a blog section, pare back the design to be more minimal etc.
As an SRE, this looks awesome. Congrats on your seed round! Do you have a careers page that I can look at (if you’re still hiring, that is)?
I think that link needs a
https://; turns into a relative URL otherwise.Company: Avenue
Company site: https://avenue.so/
Position(s): Software Engineer (Backend & Fullstack)
Location: New York City, NY, USA
Description: Avenue’s mission is to help scale the next generation of ops-driven companies. We’re building an observability platform for ops teams (think Sentry/PagerDuty but for ops). We let non-technical teams set up alerts & incident response from their database or data warehouse. We’re backed by Accel, YC, Elad Gil, Flexport, and many others.
Tech stack: React, Typescript, Prisma, Tailwind, Docker, k8s, AWS
Contact: jobs@useavenue.com
Preparing for a public launch! Exciting after several months of building in private beta :)
That mostly means putting all new features on hold, and going through our backlog to see what’s essential and has been put off…
This is really cool! Thanks for writing & sharing :)
I’m curious about a couple of things:
How do you recommend actually issuing alerts based on the query? I could imagine having a cron job execute the query and text/email/PagerDuty if there’s an anomaly returned for given period, but I’m wondering if there’s a better existing solution here.
You mentioned at the end there are some tools that provide similar functionality, I’m wondering if you could give a few examples? I know Datadog has great alarm tooling but I would imagine those are less general-purpose than a technique like this.
Hey Jeff, glad you liked it.
Just like you said. A cron job executing the query at regular intervals and sending an email/text/whatever if it detects an anomaly. I know that there are some reporting tools (I use Redash for example) that have this ability as well.
I imagine any monitoring tool should have this functionality. Datadog and Scout are two that come to mind.
The main point I wanted to convey in this article is that you set up a pretty descent monitoring system with plain SQL, zero dependencies and no $$$. From my experience, this simple method can go a long way.
We use https://www.anodot.com/ (somewhere in the org). It’s downstream from our metrics gathering that I maintain (Graphite, Prometheus) but supports both AFAIK. I also don’t know if there’s a free/open source version or it’s a paid tool.
At home:
At work:
P.S. This is my first time posting on this thread :)
Is the Recurse center a venue for ongoing technical / CS education? I had thought it was a boot camp focused on core CS skills.
It’s not a boot camp. Much more interesting. Check out their About and FAQ pages.