logs and the burden of time - 7.7.26

Read a very interesting (and apparently really important) paper about logs as an abstraction today. I continue to get sidetracked from my embedding journey!

I genuinely do not understand how a structure so seemingly integral to distributed systems and large data pipelines has never come up in school before. I really enjoy when papers like this approach a topic through introducing a problem and describing a thought process vs. just explaining their overall findings.

Sometimes nowadays with the insane speed of new developments and workflow buzzwords it can be stressful to even consider looking backwards at foundational concepts and writings in computer science. I've lately been trying to push past that, and remember how important exposure to and understanding of lower level ideas for the implementation of all the fancy new software is.

Old stuff can still be good and informative, sometimes you have to take a look at each ordered step in history to gain better context about the current state. (hmmm hamfisted metaphor)

more to come.