Avoiding spurious wakeups with my ThinkPad X1 Yoga

Last year I bought myself a ThinkPad X1 Yoga to use as my personal laptop - I've been pretty happy with it so far, but there's one problem I've run into that I've noticed a lot more lately - the laptop will sometimes wake up while the lid is closed, go back to sleep, and then repeat that whole process every few minutes. This can't be good for the hardware, so I dug into this issue and wanted to share my findings with anyone who's having the same problem running Linux on this laptop!

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Posted on 2022-01-01

Random zsh tips

My friend fREW and I both use zsh, and we've picked up a number of tricks over the years. We decided to collaborate on a post sharing some assorted tips that can really improve the zsh experience!

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Posted on 2020-10-24

Discovering your Prometheus via PromQL

Knowing about all the metrics available on a Prometheus instance can sometimes feel impossible, so I'd like to share a trick I devised to making exploring those metrics easier!

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Posted on 2020-09-26

What do you do with five minute chunks of time?

During my morning planning today, I was thinking about the highest priority work task I had on my plate. Without getting too into the details, I introduced a new component into our system, and it's been failing in... interesting ways. I can issue a command to invoke that failure, but it takes about five minutes to run its course. I figured that I might be alternating several times between provoking this failure and analyzing the new findings - so, I thought to myself: what's the best way to spend that time? Here are some thoughts I had on that:

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Posted on 2020-09-11

Save time by focusing on the result - using Prometheus' textfile collector to avoid writing an exporter

My friend Frew, as well as others, have said that our job as developers is not to write code, but rather to solve problems. I had a win in this regard relatively recently where I saved myself a good chunk of time by leveraging a Prometheus component for a purpose it may not have been designed for, but is remarkably well suited to.

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Posted on 2020-09-07