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Colin Douch

@colindou.ch
107 followers 46 following 115 posts

Formerly Techleading #o11y at Cloudflare, now attempting to touch computers as little as possible 💖💜💙🏳️‍🌈

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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 21/09/2026
Been struggling to come up with a suitably antagonizing tag line for my SRECon talk, but for now I've settled on: OTel is the new CORBA
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 28/07/2026
Other countries will never know the glory of orange guy
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 03/07/2026
Last day at DuckDuckGo today. I feel a bit weird about it, even though I've got something to go to. A few weeks off first though, time enough to relax a bit
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 25/06/2026
Have we considered that it's actually Larry the Cat who is the reason why we keep ousting PMs? Maybe he's sneakily whispering bad political ideas into the ears of Number 10 residents while they sleep
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 04/06/2026
Happy Pride Month!
A ballatro screenshot of a straight with a warning "Hand will not score. Due to Pride Month Straights are banned until July 1st"
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Reposted by Colin Douch
Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/05/2026
Everyone who talks like this has permanently shown who they are
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 20/05/2026
My first flight to the US in 6 years and I'm already 2 hours delayed. Good start 🙄
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 13/05/2026
Even a meme would do, really. But for real: working with artists isn't hard. @aliciaillustration.bsky.social has been fantastic at doing the illustrations on my slides for years now and it's made them infinitely more engaging and professional. Slop does the opposite.
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 26/04/2026
New Zealand is on the forefront of end of the night drunk food innovation
An advert for a "kebab pie" from Abrakebabra in Wellington, New Zealand
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 13/04/2026
github.com/swaywm/sway/... I live to be able to achieve this level of snark
github.com
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 06/04/2026
Writing a font rasterizer for my operating system and it's like: TTF fonts contain lines and Bezier curves - ok, fine TTF fonts contain bytecode for a Turing complete stack based VM - wait what?
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 31/03/2026
My ESTA is expiring, so the US government deemed fit to remind me that "travelling to the US has never been easier", and like, are you sure about that?
An image from my esta reminder email that says:

Traveling to the U.S. has never been easier.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE ESTA mobile app
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 23/03/2026
With the sun out, I've been getting back into doing actually tangible things, like exorcising the demons from my house before building the new garden gate
Me holding up the cross bar of a gate ala the exorcistThe nearly completed gate frame, with crossbar successfully lap jointed into place
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Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey.com · 10/03/2026
Hosting Debugging Distributed Systems track at #QConLondon next week; thrilled to have @hazelweakly.me, @hakshak.bsky.social, @voidmaze.bsky.social, @colindou.ch , and @palcu.net joining me. And we all want to hear your war stories at the unconference session! Agenda: qconlondon.com/track/mar202...
QCon London by InfoQ
Debugging Distributed Systems
March 17 / The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre - London

Liz Fong-Jones, Technical Fellow
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 05/03/2026
I wrote a quick thing on AI: blog.colindou.ch/posts/my-tho.... While AI is a semi-useful tool, we also need to acknowledge that the downsides to it are in some cases catastrophic, and no-one pushing AI does that. I miss the days when we used to laugh at Bitcoin using a countries energy supply.
blog.colindou.ch
My thoughts on AI
If there’s one thing that has come to define the modern era, it’s AI. From the early days of ChatGPT, to image generation, to the massive sweeping statements about how AI is going to “change the world...
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 28/02/2026
Ironically, losing a bunch of subscribers for supporting the US war machine might actually be a really good business strategy for OpenAI, considering by their own admission they lose money on every subscriber
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 24/01/2026
Always fun to travel Europe and still find home, even if all they have is Tui
A business card for "The Kiwi", a New Zealander run bar in Amsterdam serving the worst New Zealand beer
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 19/01/2026
It's fascinating reading Hacker News and seeing all the posts about how to protect yourself from the AI tools you're using. How to stop them from deleting things, how to stop them stealing your secrets, has there ever been a tool in the past that we just accept as being actively hostile to the user?
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 13/01/2026
Hey Perl folks - anyone know if there's a definition of what the file that NYTProf outputs actually _is_? Or am I going spelunking into the C++ that reads it for nytprofhtml?
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 12/01/2026
There's so many people lauding the fact that we can produce software so much faster with AI, and so little pushback as to whether more software is even a net positive. We just do it because we can, like a software manifest destiny
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 09/01/2026
I've been going back and forth on posting this one, but it's nice to get back into writing. Part memoir, part technical document on my time at Cloudflare: blog.colindou.ch/posts/my-tim...
blog.colindou.ch
My time at Cloudflare: A Retrospective
It’s been just over a year since I left my 7 and a bit year stint at Cloudflare, and I’ve had a lot of time to mull over the experience. I have … a lot of thoughts, and I figured the best way to get t...
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 09/12/2025
Mandatory reading that should be included in the UK citizenship pack
A pamphlet describing "how to complain"
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 19/11/2025
My one comment on the Cloudflare outage from yesterday is that it's ironic that it's almost exactly the same failure mode as the 2019 outage: shipping a config file worldwide without any validation steps. Bets on the 2031 outage reason?
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 17/11/2025
In Nuremburg again for OSMC, and making my yearly pilgrimage to have a bit of a taste of home on this side of the world.
A flat white, on a wooden plate with a Kiwi burned into it
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 15/10/2025
There's a great quote from Vonnegut in Player Piano: A step backwards, when you've taken a wrong turn is a step in the right direction. Call me a luddite, but I think about that a lot with modern tech
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Chris Douch @thisisdouch.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Lights! Crackers! Action! It's launch week! The Kickstarter for book 2 in mine and Johnny Schumann's CHEESE! series is launching at 10am on Thursday.
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 17/05/2025
I'm flying out at 6 am tomorrow, but am I getting bladdered at a Eurovision party? Obviously. I don't want to lose my queer card 😅
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 12/04/2025
I'm going to disappear from the internet for a couple of weeks, so before I go, let's drop something I've been working on. A while ago I wrote about the lack of serverless applications in the open source world (blog.colindou.ch/posts/open-s...), so here's one: github.com/sinkingpoint...
github.com
GitHub - sinkingpoint/onotify: A drop in replacement for Prometheus Alertmanager, built on top of Cloudflare Workers
A drop in replacement for Prometheus Alertmanager, built on top of Cloudflare Workers - sinkingpoint/onotify
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 06/03/2025
Even though I'm no longer there, I continue to be proud of what the Cloudflare Observability team is accomplishing. Pushing boundaries to solve unique, and not so unique problems: github.com/cloudflare/p...
github.com
GitHub - cloudflare/parquet-tsdb-poc: A POC for a tsdb storage using parquet
A POC for a tsdb storage using parquet. Contribute to cloudflare/parquet-tsdb-poc development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 04/03/2025
It's pppppppp-pancake day!
My stack of pancakes for pancake day
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 27/02/2025
Small things that bring me joy: The OpenAI status page has "we've spotted that something has gone wrong", which is separate from their "we're investigating an issue" update. What happens between those two? What is the transition from "issue" to "something has gone wrong"?
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 25/02/2025
In every conversation I've had with Pagerduty folks recently they've been really heavily pushing workflows, which is funny because everyone shits on Nagios which had event handlers 20 years ago and we've been rebuilding it worse ever since
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 14/02/2025
Small rant: If you're using AI generated images in your conference talks, and there are obvious AI artifacts, you clearly don't care about your talk and I don't care to listen. Do better than garbled text and stub handed monsters. Or better, hire an actual artist! They still exist!
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 10/02/2025
Had a blood test, and the NHS gives me two options to increase my HDL cholesterol. Anyone wanna go for a drink?
Screenshot from the NHS website indicating that I can either exercise, or consume a moderate amount of alcohol to improve my cholesterol
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Chris Douch @thisisdouch.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
Turns out the hardest part of publishing a book is getting people to buy it. Only 3 copies sold this month. I'm still determined to show that there is space for indie books in a market drenched in celebrities. Check out CHEESE! at the links in comments below
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 17/01/2025
I've been added to a few starter packs and I am pretty sure it is people confusing me for @thisisdouch.bsky.social . I'm ok with this.
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 13/01/2025
I'm slowly learning that bipolar isn't conducive to being a good open source contributor when I can just not want to code for months at a time, and it sort of kills me inside 😭 I miss you OSS friends!
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 12/12/2024
I wrote a new thing: blog.colindou.ch/posts/bing-l... . Something's up with Bing and NPM. Is it an NPM corruption? Is Bing leaking memory? Who knows!
blog.colindou.ch
Does Bing have a buffer overflow?
A few days ago, I was doing some Typescript work and went to search for a specific NPM package that I needed the docs for. I generally use DuckDuckGo these days, so I popped in my search and got back ...
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 10/12/2024
I was reminded of this earlier today, and now I'm here wondering why it's not a built in notification sound for pagerduty
youtu.be
Something Went Terribly Wrong
YouTube video by Meh
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 03/12/2024
I note that the Enron revival has a careers page, and I'm not saying I'm curious, but the ethics training for those jobs would be hilarious
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 20/11/2024
Google Maps keeps trying to autocorrect Waterloo (station) to Waterloo (Belgium) when I plot directions, and the fact that they have remotely comparable travel times to my mates house in Haslemere is a damning indictment of the UK train system
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 02/11/2024
Not me, reading the Swiss registration rules to see if they let foreigners register .ch domains
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 31/10/2024
To distract my self from *life* at the moment, I spent the last few days translating Go’s text/template into Typescript: github.com/sinkingpoint... . Why? *Secrets*, but it’s probably useful in the @cloudflare.social ecosystem somewhere Could an AI have done it better? Probably.
github.com
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 23/10/2024
Am I the only one that starts to get confused about all the z?? tools around? Zed, Zig, Zod, it's a bit silly
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 10/10/2024
Minor personal update: I left Cloudflare and have moved back to the UK. If any of y'all want to grab a drink and catch up then reach out!
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 04/08/2024
Today in Linux esoterica: A Netlink socket is always SOCK_DGRAM, even if you _request_ SOCK_RAW. That means that if you do a `read` with a buffer smaller than a message, you'll just drop data. Ugh.
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 09/06/2024
Found my new favourite Rust type: doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/stru...
doc.rust-lang.org
Yeet in std::ops - Rust
Implement `FromResidual<Yeet<T>>` on your type to enable `do yeet expr` syntax in functions returning your type.
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 06/06/2024
On my way to Portland in three hops: MEL -> SYD -> YVR -> PDX, weirdly arriving only two hours after I left. Time travel!
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 05/06/2024
As much as I'm looking forward to @monitorama.bsky.social next week, I'm _super_ anxious about going to the states for the first time in a few years :S
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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 03/06/2024
Marking our first real foray into #OpenTelemetry, we dove into the deep end a completely replaced our logging pipeline: blog.cloudflare.com/adopting-ope... It wasn't easy, we caused several large incidents, but we got there in the end and it's super exciting where we can go from here
blog.cloudflare.com
Adopting OpenTelemetry for our logging pipeline
Recently, Cloudflare's Observability team undertook an effort to migrate our existing syslog-ng backed logging infrastructure to instead being backed by OpenTelemetry Collectors. In this post, we deta...
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