I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my career. Maybe this is my version of a mid-life crisis, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact I’ve had, and my prospects for actually making things better from here.

In the past five years, I’ve started the transition out of an individual contributor role, and into a varying mixture of product ownership, project management, and architecture (depending on the year). I was interested to move “up” so I could start grappling with larger challenges that I’d long seen but couldn’t do anything about. The obvious price - that I no longer have much time to write code - has had huge effects on my job satisfaction, with which I’m still coming to terms. Overall, it seems like there’s a paradox of impact here.

That is:

The more you can rightly say, “I did that” the less likely anyone will know what you’re talking about.

The funny thing about reasoning with incomplete or irrelevant information is that it’s hard to be objective; it’s hard to tell from motivated reasoning and outright justification.

Introduction

Recently I came across a blog post arguing that nobody really wants logs; what they really want is event streams. This has me thinking about the work we do when we debug production problems in Indy, and how difficult and elusive that task can be. In this post, I’ll to explore why production support is hard, what we’re missing, and how we can improve the situation with a perspective shift.

Then, I’m going to talk about how we can expand on this new approach to radically improve the experience for users.