Top all-time · #4675
James Turnbull
Personal blog · kartar.netsystemsprogramming
James Turnbull writes Kartar.Net, a personal blog at kartar.net about systems and programming. Since 2010, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “Intro to Distributed Tracing”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link James Turnbull's blog for posts on Docker and configuration management with Puppet, a Dell XPS 13 review, structured logging, and the background to his Prometheus book.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
James Turnbull's blog about technology, monitoring, and more
Most-linked posts?
- Intro to Distributed Tracing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-15
- /2018/03/dell-xps-13-aka-2018-is-the-year-of-linux-on-the-desktop/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-14
What Hacker News says?
For added perspective here's another recent review of another engineer who made the switch: https://www.kartar.net/2018/03/dell-xps-13-aka-2018-is-the-y...
Comment linking /2018/03/dell-xps-13-aka-2018-is-the-year-of-linux-on-the-desktop/
on “Dell XPS 13 Review from a lifelong Mac user”Submitted Just Enough Clojure for Riemann as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI think they can co-exist: the market and the use cases are really broad and there's a lot of space for a wide variety of tooling. I wrote a blog post about Docker and Configuration Management that elaborates on this: http://kartar.net/2013/11/docker-and-configuration-managemen... And I wrote a blog post talking about using Puppet and Docker that talks about how they might interact: http://kartar.net/2013/12/buildin…
Comment linking /2013/12/building-puppet-apps-inside-docker/
on “Docker on Linode”Submitted The Docker Book released as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI did exactly that with Puppet as an experiment: http://kartar.net/2013/12/building-puppet-apps-inside-docker... . Works reasonably well. I will say though that the Dockerfile syntax is, IMHO, much easier to use than Puppet/Chef/etc. Disclaimer: I work at Docker and previously worked at Puppet Labs.
Comment linking /2013/12/building-puppet-apps-inside-docker/
on “Fig: Fast, isolated development environments using Docker”Submitted Using Riemann for Fault Detection as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIt's fairly easy to integrate configuration management tools into your Docker workflow - I wrote a blog post about it here: http://kartar.net/2013/12/building-puppet-apps-inside-docker... .
Comment linking /2013/12/building-puppet-apps-inside-docker/
on “Docker at Spotify”Submitted Skaffold as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's a dump of blogs I follow that have lots of devops-oriented contents. http://www.kartar.net/ http://www.kitchensoap.com/ http://www.masterzen.fr/ http://blog.nistu.de/ http://www.jedi.be/blog/ http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/ http://www.unixdaemon.net/ http://www.rottenbytes.info/ http://blog.lusis.org/ http://bitfieldconsulting.com/ http://agilesysadmin.net/
Comment linking /
on “DevOps Reading List: 10 Books & Blogs You Should Read”Submitted Intro to Distributed Tracing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe raw data in the spreadsheet, which I have continued to update and is now up to 15 databases with 30 characteristics each, is indeed applicable to both people who want to pick up a database and use it in their monitoring stack, or who want to use a time series database for another purpose. Some of the newer additions like Warp10 and Akumuli for example have comments about being great choices for sensor applicatio…
Comment linking /2015/08/monitoring-survey-2015---tools/
on “Comparison of opensource time series db's”Submitted A Walkthrough of Prometheus by James Turnbull as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPersonally like Linux a lot. It is worth it for the first-class docker support. James Turnbull had an article reviewing the XPS 13 last year. It is what I would recommend: https://www.kartar.net/2018/03/dell-xps-13-aka-2018-is-the-y...
Comment linking /2018/03/dell-xps-13-aka-2018-is-the-year-of-linux-on-the-desktop/
on “Ask HN: Linux vs. Mac for Developer”Submitted Investment decisions when building developer communities as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAfter using https://github.com/inconshreveable/log15 for Go, I become sold on structured logging (read more http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/category/logging/ and https://kartar.net/2015/12/structured-logging/ ). I've decided that Rust must have a strong structured logging solution, and so I present: slog-rs. I believe it reached a level of usability justifying sharing with a wider audience. See slog-rs features: https:…
Comment linking /2015/12/structured-logging/
on “slog-rs: Structured, composable logging for Rust”Submitted Investment decisions when building developer communities as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSome useful background info in https://www.kartar.net/2017/10/prometheus/ on why Turnbull wrote the book, despite being one of the maintainers for a competing monitoring tool, Riemann.
Comment linking /2017/10/prometheus/
on “Monitoring with Prometheus”Submitted VPE and CTO – The First 90 Days as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building your first product road map as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Intro to Distributed Tracing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monitoring Survey 2015 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Art of Monitoring as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monitoring Survey as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building Puppet-based applications inside Docker as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted James White’s Rules for Infrastructure as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
