Like most middle aged technology writers who write independently online, it’s been harder to “little-p” publish a steady stream of words in recent years. I’ve gotten better at this in 2020 thanks to the WP Scheduled Posts plugin for WordPress. The plugin has a bunch of free and paid features I’ve never looked at — for me it all comes down to the calendar view. This lets you see your already scheduled posts and easily shuffle them around via the calendar. This lets me bank a bunch of smaller posts ahead of time, but then easily slot larger pieces in […]

NPM’s Dependency Model:

I’m coming up on about a year of full-time NodeJS work, and it’s only now that I’m starting to understand the true nature of NPM’s dependency management. When I’ve used other systems, (primarily composer), “management” of those dependencies meant your package manager will yell as you if there’s a conflicting package. You want to install version 3 of foo/bar? Well too bad, one of your dependencies can only deal with version 2 of foo/bar — sort it out. NPM works a little differently. Instead of a project’s packages being one big soup, each of your dependencies will have its own […]

I’m coming up on about a year of full-time NodeJS work, and it’s only now that I’m starting to understand the true nature of NPM’s dependency management. When I’ve used other systems, (primarily composer), “management” of those dependencies meant your package manager will yell as you if there’s a conflicting package. You want to install version 3 of foo/bar? Well too bad, one of your dependencies can only deal with version 2 of foo/bar — sort it out. NPM works a little differently. Instead of a project’s packages being one big soup, each of your dependencies will have its own […]

OpenTelemetry’s NPM Packages:

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Tracing Systems with Zipkin and OpenTracing. Earlier posts include What is a Zipkin Trace?, Instrumenting Traces with Zipkin, and Tracing NodeJS Services with Open Telemetry. This is the most recent post in the series. In our previous OpenTelemetry articles, we gave a broad “hello world” overview of how an end-user-programmer might use OpenTelemetry to instrument their programs and generate metrics and traces. Today we’re going to take a look at the entire OpenTelemetry Javascript project, as it exists in mid-2020. This article should help you understand the project as a […]

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Tracing Systems with Zipkin and OpenTracing. Earlier posts include What is a Zipkin Trace?, Instrumenting Traces with Zipkin, and Tracing NodeJS Services with Open Telemetry. This is the most recent post in the series. In our previous OpenTelemetry articles, we gave a broad “hello world” overview of how an end-user-programmer might use OpenTelemetry to instrument their programs and generate metrics and traces. Today we’re going to take a look at the entire OpenTelemetry Javascript project, as it exists in mid-2020. This article should help you understand the project as a […]

Tracing NodeJS Services with Open Telemetry:

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Tracing Systems with Zipkin and OpenTracing. Earlier posts include What is a Zipkin Trace?, and Instrumenting Traces with Zipkin. This is the most recent post in the series. In the first two articles in this series we took a crash course in instrumenting a small three service system using Zipkin. Today we’re going to take a look at using OpenTelemetry to do that same thing, and then we’ll export those same metrics to Zipkin. This article assumes you’ve read those previous two articles, have NodeJS installed on your computer, and […]

Instrumenting Traces with Zipkin:

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Tracing Systems with Zipkin and OpenTracing. Earlier posts include What is a Zipkin Trace?. This is the most recent post in the series. Last time we ran a small, three service pre-instrumented system that reported spans into Zipkin. In this article we’re going to take a look at how we instrumented that system using Zipkin’s free and open source libraries. This article assumes you have a version of NodeJS on your computer, a Zipkin instance running on port 9411, and have a copy of our sample services checked-out/cloned on your […]

Nachdem der letzte Beitrag von unserer neuen Extension handelte, die automatisch die benötigte MwSt.-Anpassung von 19% auf 16% und von 7% auf 5% vornimmt (Link zum Beitrag / Link zur Extension M1 oder M2), nun auch ein kleines Turtorial wie man die Bruttopreise im Frontend rel. komfortabel anpassen kann, ohne alle Preise manuell oder per...

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Tracing Systems with Zipkin and OpenTracing. Later posts include Instrumenting Traces with Zipkin, and Tracing NodeJS Services with Open Telemetry. In our last series we took a look at Prometheus, its metric data types, and how it compares to the OpenTelemetry project. In this next series we’re going to do the same for Zipkin and OpenTelemetry traces. Metrics are designed to count things, and to measure how long those things take to complete. A trace, and the individual parts of a trace (called spans — but don’t worry too much […]