Hammatt Blog

Throughout my career so far, nearly every application I have come across logs far too much, and consistently at too high of a log level. Lots of things which should not really be logs, but rather be either operational or business metrics, or may even be a domain event, are chucked in as a log. Let’s categorise the different things which I have seen logged, and talk about how we should handle them instead. And finish up with what a valuable set of logs actually looks like. ...

In the past when we had ideas and wanted to spread them around, talk about them, discuss them. We would write blogposts. Now, we are influencing a whole new crowd, for better or worse. It’s no secret that the big foundational models are trained with as much data from the internet as they can harvest. The only problem is that this new reader does not feed back, and may not apply as much critical thinking as to whether what it’s reading is right or not. I do believe there are benefits to this though. Maybe we will all be immortalised through our writing as matrix entries in a Large Language Model. If LLMs just do whatever is written on the internet. Then there is a lot of value in publishing good high quality writing on a variety of topics. ...

Not only do I consider learning things one of my hobbies, but I also consider it a cornerstone of my career. Of the many things that I learn about every day, the one which garners the most interest from the widest variety of people is Japanese. I believe that there are some relatable lessons that you can take away from this journey. And hope that given it is a language, and we all use some kind of language (even if not spoken), we can all relate. ...