Latest posts
- You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates ItAug 28, 2026Mathew Duggan
FDR has always been one of my favorite presidents, second maybe to Lincoln. Both were men the establishment assumed were one of them until, to their horror, they governed like they weren't. Both could trash the opposition in one breath and take the moral high ground in the
- In Purgatory Everyone Likes Crepes: My Time at a Greek All-InclusiveAug 21, 2026Mathew Duggan
I can’t remember the last time I was actually hot. It’s a thought that keeps looping through my head as I stand next to a children’s play structure in a Greek all-inclusive waterpark. The sun is beating down on an international community of
- OTel Isn't Going Well (And I Made A Spreadsheet About It)Aug 12, 2026Mathew Duggan
For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?" Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put
- I added a blogrollJul 20, 2026Mathew Duggan
I realized that it might be nice if you happen to stumble on this website if I had a way to recommend other websites you might enjoy. As it turns out this is a "blogroll", a concept I have never heard of before today but whatever. It'
- Art Doesn't ScaleJul 17, 2026Mathew Duggan
Listening to two acquaintances argue about if AI art is "art" is not a new experience for me, the now eternal debate between Doomer and Boomer. In this particular context, I'm listening to it as I wait for my surprisingly expensive iced latte in downtown Copenhagen.
- Midnight Train to StockholmJul 03, 2026Mathew Duggan
I was recently summoned to a meeting in Stockholm, a city I had somehow managed to avoid despite living in Copenhagen for years. My Swedish experience, up to this point, consisted entirely of trips to Malmö — the closest Swedish city to Denmark and, more importantly, home to a
- Clickhouse is winning the Observability WarsJul 01, 2026Mathew Duggan
For roughly the last ten years, a meaningful percentage of my working hours have been spent thinking about observability. If you're not familiar with the term, "observability" is what we call it now that "monitoring" doesn't sound expensive enough. The actual work
- The Intolerable Hypocrisy of CyberlibertarianismMay 07, 2026Mathew Duggan
I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of
- If I Could Make My Own GitHubApr 30, 2026Mathew Duggan
My friend and I have a game where we talk about what we'd do if we were rich. Not rich like 'paid off the mortgage' rich. Rich like a man who owns a submarine he's never been inside. Rich like a man whose third
- You can absolutely have an RSS dependent website in 2026Apr 09, 2026Mathew Duggan
I write stuff here. Sometimes the stuff is good. Sometimes it reads like I wrote it at 2 AM after an argument with a YAML file, which is because I did. But one decision I made early on was that I didn't want to offer an email newsletter.
- I Can't See Apple's VisionMar 26, 2026Mathew Duggan
Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people,
- Hosting a Snowflake ProxyMar 24, 2026Mathew Duggan
In the nightmarish world of 2026 it can be difficult to know how to help at all. There are too many horrors happening to quickly to know where one can inject even a small amount of assistance. However I wanted to quickly post about something I did that was easy,
- Markdown Ate The WorldMar 23, 2026Mathew Duggan
I have always enjoyed the act of typing words and seeing them come up on screen. While my favorite word processor of all time might be WordPerfect (here), I've used almost all of them. These programs were what sold me on the entire value proposition of computers. They
- Update to the Ghost theme that powers this siteMar 10, 2026Mathew Duggan
I added a few modifications to the OSS Ghost theme that powers this site. You can get it here: https://gitlab.com/matdevdug/minimal-ghost-theme Added better image caption support. Added the cool Mastodon feature outlined here to attribute posts from your site back to your Mastodon username by
- Boy I was wrong about the FediverseMar 06, 2026Mathew Duggan
I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter.