observability VS obsidian-releases

GitLab team member here, putting my personal hat on - from my experience in using different Git workflows since 2009, a smaller clean unit of work can with debugging and troubleshooting. It also provides a way to new team members and contributors to understand the thought process and ideation to implement a new architecture, apply performance fixes, add documentation, work with tests, additional fixes, until its final release. Most of this can be tracked within a MR/PR and the history of code reviews, etc. - even after the merge and squash and Git branch delete, not trying to argue with this functionality. :)

From the Git CLI, without any reference to Git* platforms, it is not so obvious when searching for a commit that introduced a bug, e.g. using "git bisect" for binary search. Reading a 10,000 lines git diff can be harder than a smaller commit that also explains the reasoning in the commit message. Speaking from own experience and programming mistakes in a small team, focussing on clean commits and a good history tremendously helped in stressful debug situations. Until you hit a compiler regression bug, but that's a different story then ;)

I'm personally still very fast on the Git CLI, but I also know that there are a variety of CLI and UI tools out there that can help with analysing large Git commits. Potentially in the future also AI assisted that tell us which change a diff caused a performance regression in a release 5 months later. Or we don't need it at all because Observability driven development enabled to see these problems before merging and code reviews, e.g. the memory leak but only when DNS fails. True story from ~2016, more in my KubeCon EU talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkREMg8adaI and project at https://gitlab.com/everyonecancontribute/observability/cpp-d...

GitLab team member here, thanks for sharing!

I'm using the Web IDE to take notes in most of my projects, work and personal, and publish the notes with MkDocs and GitLab Pages to a searchable frontend/domain when needed. Editing also happens in Gitpod with live preview in the browser.

You can find all resources for o11y.love [0] and opsindev.news [1] in the GitLab projects, including .gitpod.yml configuration, mkdocs.yml setup, .gitlab-ci.yml deployments.

I have been writing lots of documentation in my past OSS projects, so I am used to Markdown as markup language, taking notes very fast. Learning Markdown requires some practice, and can be helped within Gitpod and the VS Code extensions, if the default preview is not sufficient. [2] [3] You can also sync the notes repository offline into VS Code as desktop IDE for example.

Using Obsidian.md to take notes and publish with GitLab pages [4] looks promising too; I have not tried it yet.

[0] https://gitlab.com/everyonecancontribute/observability/o11y....

[1] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/opsindev.news

[2] https://www.gitpod.io/docs/ides-and-editors/vscode-extension...

[3] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/markdown

[4] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/15/publishing-obsidian...

The closest editor that follows our first principle is Obsidian editor:

The solution was already installed on both my computer and my phone: Obsidian.

> why does open source need to "win"

Open source does not need to win.

But your ability to be in control of your computer needs to be preserved. A proprietary fridge cannot control your diet, while a proprietary App Store can control what software you install on YOUR phone (unless you live in EU, hello DMA!). The tail wags the dog, so to speak. Proprietary software has also been shown to break user workflows or remove functions in an update while leaving users with no choice whatsoever.

One alternative to having open source win is to ensure software must come with a robust warranty and other assurances you expect from the things you buy. EU's CRA will make software vulnerabilities in WiFi routers covered by warranty, for example.

You can also ensure robust and interoperable data storage options. For example, https://obsidian.md/ stores all notes in Markdown, not holding the data hostage in case users will not like how future versions will work. GDPR actually has a provision for data portability (Art. 20), but it does not seem to have a requisite effect on the industry yet.

And until the above issues are solved, open source remains the best way to ensure that a software tail cannot wag your computer dog.

[2] https://obsidian.md/

So I've had my fair share of personal websites and blogs. I have built them on stacks ranging from the most basic HTML and CSS, to hosted frameworks like Wordpress and Laravel, to the more modern single page applications built in Vue and React. For a simple content blog I think you can't go wrong with a Static Site Generator though. These days I am almost exclusively writing everything in Obsidian. Which is great because its all in standard markdown format. This allows for a really neat and easy content publishing workflow.

Consider making an Obsidian[^1] plugin, or writing to Obsidian-compatible Markdown files :)

[^1]: https://obsidian.md/

Obsidian is a writing application created to allow for offline / private note taking in markdown format, in an interface that looks a lot like our regular programming IDE. It is very flexible, with a good collection of community plugins that you can use to customize Obsidian to your heart contents.

Obsidian support via our Obsidian Plugin