micro VS zap

Hi HN

I'm Asim, an engineer and author of the open source project Micro (https://micro.dev). I've been on this forum in various forms since 2009. In that time I've seen a lot of shifts in the technology landscape, participated in a few and even tried to start a company myself (which ended up VC funded). In typical HN fashion, I drank the kool-aid and applied to YC around 8-10 times. I got so far as going to mountain view for an interview but never got in. I played right into the idea of starting a fast growing company and "changing the world" by solving my own problems in the developer ecosystem but somewhere along the way lost sight of the problem I was solving. I think it speaks to my own need to seek validation (in the wrong place) but also the general nature of the ecosystem that became all about the pursuit of more funding, growth, users, etc. It really feels like while there's 70-80% value created, the other 20-30% is doing us a lot of harm. Consumer software has become addictive, corporations are becoming huge profit seeking blackholes that mostly cater to their shareholders and we have yet to see any great alternative to the existing tools and services we're now beholden too.

A couple weeks ago I posted Micro Chat (https://micro.mu) on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36135683. This was my first effort in trying to solve the problems mentioned above. But I don't think it's enough. I think what we're talking about is something much bigger. And it's not going to be solved by open source, federation or a single tool. I'm starting to think we need to build something bigger, an entirely new community led app platform.

So here's my idea. Mu (pronounced mew) is a proposal to build a new community app platform from the ground up. It would address all the problems we seem to mention here about ownership of services, addictive scrolling, profit seeking agendas and do it by empowering a community to crowdfund the creation of an alternative system that focuses on being a utility for the people. It would generally be open source, potentially self hostable, but the larger goal would be to empower a handful of people to host and run the service for everyone else, a built like how Let's Encrypt is run today.

I've thrown this idea around a lot, started many discussions here and even tried to push a few things out but never really gotten anywhere with it. I think part of it is to just, build the smallest piece and see where it goes, hence Micro Chat, but the other part is to gauge the sentiment in the room and see whether we can actually fund something much bigger totally aligned with the community. I'm a huge fan of Google services and the utility they offer, but the nature of technology has veered so far into addiction with scrolling feeds, streaming and social media that I feel there's a need to do something now.

If there's interest, please comment and provide feedback.

Cheers

Hey all

I'm Asim. I'm an engineer who's been hacking on an open source project called Micro for the past eight years (https://micro.dev). In that time I've done a lot of things, all Dev related but ultimately most of my career was spent working on platforms for consumer products. After many attempts I've decided the path forward is to focus on building something that solves my own problem. Micro Chat is a solution to some of the social media problems I've been having.

What I've been looking for most of my life is a community. A place to belong. I scoured the internet for that with strangers. But I think that's wrong. The public forums are also the wrong place to find that connection. What we need to do is focus on smaller communities starting with real connections. We need to strip away a lot of the addictive behaviours and issues created by social media. I think things like hackernews are great because it's very simple text based, with no notification and centers around conversations about topics of interest. I think that's how group chat should also be. The difference here is, I want a place to build small private communities e.g micro communities. Most real groups lose their value beyond a certain size. For me that's around 20 people. As an introvert I really care about strong connections with a handful of people. Unfortunately those real world connections are now spread globally as people moved away and while we have private slacks or WhatsApp grojps to stay in touch it just feels like the wrong setup for that. If anything I want to consolidate it into one place.

Anyway I'm sharing this now to get some feedback. I think the tech and the product will evolve but only by finding out if others feel the same.

https://micro.mu

Happy to help anyone starting up. I raised a couple mil in seed funding for an open source project after bootstrapping for a few years. I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding.

We built this https://M3O.com. It was based on this https://github.com/micro/micro

Just happy to help given my own tough experiences. Pitch deck reviews, intros, etc.

Had similar goals. Started by writing Go interfaces for it with Go Micro - https://go-micro.dev then opted for the platform service model as you mentioned with Micro - https://micro.dev

I think whether it's Dapr, Micro or something else, the platform service model with well defined interfaces is the way to go. I don't think a lot of people get this yet so it's still going to be a few years before it takes off.

What if any is the relationship between https://m3o.com/ and https://micro.dev/ ?

I shared this post in a few developer communities like Hacker News and it was well received. Over the past few years I've been working on an open source project called Micro, an API first development platform and I'm now sharing Micro Services, a catalog of reusable real world Micro services.

Wait, I've seen this repository on HN a few days ago: https://github.com/micro/micro

Are you affiliated with this repository? How is it related to yours?

The project currently uses slog package from standard library for logging. But switching to a more advanced logger like zap could offer more flexibility and features.

It's nice to have this in the standard library, but it doesn't solve any existing pain points around structured log metadata and contexts. We use zap [0] and store a zap logger on the request context which allows different parts of the request pipeline to log with things like tenantid, traceId, and correlationId automatically appended. But getting a logger off the context is annoying, leads to inconsistent logging practices, and creates a logger dependency throughout most of our Go code.

[0] https://github.com/uber-go/zap

Kubebuilder, like much of the k8s ecosystem, utilizes zap for logging. Out of the box, the Kubebuilder zap configuration outputs a timestamp for each log, which gets formatted using scientific notation. This makes it difficult for me to read the time of an event just by glancing at it. Personally, I prefer ISO 8601, so let's change it!

What else would you expect from a structured logging package?

To me it absolutely makes sense as the default and standard for 99% of applications, and the API isn't much unlike something like Zap[0] (a popular Go structured logger).

The attributes aren't an "arbitrary" concept, they're a completely normal concept for structured loggers. Groups are maybe less standard, but reasonable nevertheless.

I'm not sure if you're aware that this is specifically a structured logging package. There already is a "simple" logging package[1] in the sodlib, and has been for ages, and isn't particularly fast either to my knowledge. If you want really fast you take a library (which would also make sure to optimize allocations heavily).

[0]: https://pkg.go.dev/go.uber.org/zap

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/log

And finally for structured logging: https://github.com/uber-go/zap

For logging: I recommend using Uber Zap https://github.com/uber-go/zap It will log stack backtraces and makes it super easy to debug errors when deployed. I typically log in the business logic and not below. And log at the entry for failures to start the system. Maybe not necessary for this example, but it’s an essential piece of any API backend.