wbh1

You are correct — wide events are essentially equivalent to structured logs. Charity Majors says as much in her blog post linked at the top of this article.

> The building block of o11y 2.0 is wide, structured log events

Wide events and structured logs are often used interchangeably. One caveat is that in "wide, structured log events" you're only emitting one [giant] log for each request coming through your service. In contrast, I still see many people using structured logs but in the "old fashioned" way of emitting multiple log lines per request.

I've really enjoyed working for Linode. We're a smaller company (~250 people total), but work on a global scale. I've found the work to be challenging but rewarding, leadership to be approachable and willing to listen, and the benefits to be great. Coming from a large higher education environment (where the "Information Services" department was 600+ people) it's remarkable how much better the culture is here.

Banner (and Ellucian) is my trigger word.

Really enjoyed this write-up. I'm currently in the process of scaling out a Prometheus-based replacement for an old Nagios setup that was scaled to its limit and posts like this just make me that much more excited for Prometheus as a technology.

Exact same experiences here. As soon as I start to develop a sleep deficit, all those negative feelings come racing back.

The accessibility to executives is something I've noticed even just working on contracts with Top Hat. I am surprised at the level of engagement that your VPs and C-suite execs have with customers. It certainly makes customers feel cared for.

I'm not involved in the curriculum development side of things, so I don't have much input into that. And prior to the implementation of Top Hat, our students had all been using physical "clickers" to respond to in-class questions.

However, Top Hat implemented a program where the students could trade in their old clicker and get a 5 year Top Hat subscription. Plus a "Lifetime" Top Hat subscription is cheaper than buying a clicker, so students have seen it as a net win.

We do not receive financial compensation from Cengage, Pearson, or McGraw. The strategic part is that they offer more services to us, let us test new stuff they're toying with, and help our profs develop custom content.

I still take classes, so I definitely feel the hit of these textbook prices. It's also why I've advocated for pushing more towards a "direct integration" method of provide course content in our LMS. Students pay ~$60 for access to the content, instead of $100+ for a textbook. It still adds up, but it's a way to start to lower costs.

(and the prices keep going down. I just found out yesterday that one of our vendors is dropping the price of a range of course content because of high adoption rate)

Disclosure: I work for a large University (combined residential+online presence of ~100k) and we have contracts with Pearson, McGraw, Cengage, and Top Hat.

Top Hat has been surprisingly enjoyable to work with from a contractual side. They've been accommodating to our needs and worked with us to improve their product -- I'm actually working on a SOW with them right now where they'll be adding new features for us at 0 cost.

Even though we have strategic partnerships with these large publishers, I wouldn't mind seeing them go by the wayside in favor of integrating more of Top Hat's digital content.