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Austin Parker on software, observability, AI, and the open web.

@aparker.io1readers31posts1mo ago

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if i have to read one more piece of generated text i will kms

there are approximately three good reasons to generate text that another human being will read.

Reflection, September 2025

The Future Of Software Is Small

The dominance of SaaS platforms in business and pleasure today is a cyclic one. If you went back in time to the 1980's and told them that 21% of the industry was using the same CRM platform they'd probably nod serenely, knowing that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Everyone Is Wrong, All The Time.

Much has been written about the nature of large language models to hallucinate. In a stunning victory for linguistic determinism, we've decided that this means that LLM output is somehow 'wrong'. I would, briefly, argue the opposite. This isn't to say that LLMs don't hallucinate but that the word isn't really a useful one in the way that it's commonly used.

JSON Is The Wrong Content Type For LLM Inputs.

This isn't an exhaustive or fully baked idea yet, but I've been noticing a trend with MCP servers -- they love to just yeet a bunch of JSON at an LLM. I think this is well-intentioned but not super optimal.

I Set Up My iPad Again, Please Clap.

I feel like every few years I go through a "hm, i could probably just use an ipad for most things" so I spent today getting it set back up. Will it work this time? No clue! The iPad is, like, 75% of what I need out of a computer but most days I feel like I prefer using my MacBook Air for general fuckin' around, and idk what I'd really get out of the iPad. The dream, I guess, is that I would only need One Thing on an airplane, and if my job was just emails then maybe that'd work, but I also need to write code and run containers and do other shit that's kinda nice to have an actual computer for.

Wide Events, Personal Software, and You.

I recently built a fun little project called 777-BSKY. It looks at Bluesky trending topics, does some math, figures out what's most popular and slaps some TTS on it. You can call a phone number and have the output read back to you, kinda like Moviefone except all of the movies are talking about the twilight of the American experiment.

observabilitysoftware

Introducing locol

The best projects to work on are the ones that scratch a few different itches at once. I've wanted to write a native macOS application for years now, but I've always found building GUIs to be tedious and -- frankly -- hard to wrap my head around. I've also wanted a better way to manage a local OpenTelemetry Collector on my Mac for quite a while as well. Thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence and a little bit of gumption, I've accomplished both of these goals. Introducing locol.

aiobservability

One Weird Trick

I was reading Mike Masnick's piece in TechDirt the other day where he discusses tech optimism in the face of, well, everything that's going on in the world right now. I don't really want to bore you with a repetition of the ills facing society here at the beginning of 2025, other than to say there's a lot of them. Instead, I want to talk about why I'm optimistic, too.

atprotosoftware

The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry

I recently presented a talk at Monitorama 2024 titled 'The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry'. The slides for that talk are available at https://austinlparker.github.io/monitorama-2024.

Re-Redefining Observability

This post is a response/companion to Hazel Weakly's excellent 'Redefining Observability'. You should probably read it first, and perhaps Fred Hebert's commentary on it, 'A Commentary on Defining Observability'. I don't necessarily plan on re-treading a lot of the ground that both of them do, and instead, want to focus on breaking down some of the definitions and missing pieces that both present.

Don't Work For Projects That Don't Have Open Governance

I'm going to weigh in on the Redis thing.