Top all-time · #7083
Jeremy Morrell
Personal blog · jeremymorrell.dev/blogprogrammingweb
Jeremy Morrell's personal blog at jeremymorrell.dev covers programming and web. Since 2024, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Readers link Jeremy Morrell's blog for its observability writing, including a minimal OpenTelemetry tracing implementation and a guide to wide events.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Jeremy Morrell's homepage
Most-linked posts?
- A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2024-10-22
- OpenTelemetry Tracing in < 200 lines of code3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-17
- OpenTelemetry and the Value of Standards – Jeremy Morrell2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-16
- /blog/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-06
- Extensible Software in the Age of LLMs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-08-18
What Hacker News says?
There's an excellent article on how to implement OpenTelemetry Tracing in 200 lines of code. https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/minimal-js-tracing/ "It might help to go over a non-exhaustive list of things the offical SDK handles that our little learning library doesn’t: - Buffer and batch outgoing telemetry data in a more efficient format. Don’t send one-span-per-http request in production. Your vendor will want to hav…
Comment linking /blog/minimal-js-tracing/
on “I got OpenTelemetry to work. But why was it so complicated?”Submitted OpenTelemetry Tracing in < 200 lines of code as a story · 251 points
HN discussion> For example, every damn log message has hundreds of fields,. Most of which never change. Why not push this information once, on service startup an not with every log message? If the log field doesn't change with every log entry, then good databases for logs (such as VictoriaLogs) compress such a field by 1000x and more times, so its' storage space usage can be ignored, and it doesn't affect query performance in an…
Comment linking /blog/a-practitioners-guide-to-wide-events/
on “Graceful Shutdown in Go: Practical Patterns”Submitted A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events as a story · 91 points
HN discussionAs a data point I started a blog this past year. It’s very technical content, and it’s driven around 100k visits just sharing it in socials https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/ My takeaway has been that I’ve dramatically underinvested in public writing in my career and will be doubling down on that. I don’t really care about audience size, but the feedback and engagement from people whose work I respect has been amazing.…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?”Submitted Extensible Software in the Age of LLMs as a story · 6 points
HN discussionJeremy Morrell apparently started a blog in 2024, wrote 3 posts for it, and each one of them would make my "top 5 blog posts of 2024" list. https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?”Submitted OpenTelemetry and the Value of Standards – Jeremy Morrell as a story · 3 points
HN discussionProperly implemented wide events usually reduce storage costs comparing to typical chaotic logging of everything. It is expected that a single external request leads to exactly one wide event with all the information about this request, which may be needed for further debugging and analytics. See https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/a-practitioners-guide-to-wide... .
Comment linking /blog/a-practitioners-guide-to-wide-events/
on “Scaling our observability platform by embracing wide events and replacing OTel”Submitted A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt is not written by an observability vendor, nor is it an advertisement. Source: I wrote it and do not work at an observability vendor: https://jeremymorrell.dev/about/ (I wrote it mostly so I could stop re-explaining this concept from first-principles and how to go about implementing it over-and-over again )
Comment linking /about/
on “A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events”Submitted Extensible Software in the Age of LLMs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou are essentially describing a proto-tracing system. At the risk of self-promoting twice in one comments section, I have a post walking through going from what you describe above to OTel-compatible tracing: https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/minimal-js-tracing/ You are right that what you were doing is very similar! However standardization helps a lot here.
Comment linking /blog/minimal-js-tracing/
on “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)”Submitted On OpenTelemetry and the Value of Standards as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHN always grumbles about OTel, but I agree. It's fine, and important: https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/opentelemetry-and-the-value-o... I understand the author's perspective in the linked article, but none of that data shows a project in trouble? Some languages have more resources than others, but those all look like healthy open source projects
Comment linking /blog/opentelemetry-and-the-value-of-standards/
on “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)”Submitted A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted OpenTelemetry Tracing in 200 lines of code (2024) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events as a story · 1 points
HN discussion