iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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 · 21/08/2026

For living on a different continent, emergency plans. Who looks after things if you need to drop everything and be on a plane in less than 12h?

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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 06/08/2026

I'm more of a P50Conf guy myself

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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 · 07/07/2026

I think a lot of politicians have proven that it's entirely ok to drop the mask the second you get elected

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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 06/07/2026

I had one last time I was up north. Large and dense, but delicious. Didn't need to eat for a couple of days.

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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 · 11/06/2026

Seconding zed. I found it's not as one-size-fits-all as other options were out of the box, but it's easy to customise and super snappy

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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 exorcist

The nearly completed gate frame, with crossbar successfully lap jointed into place

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Reposted by Colin Douch

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 · 25/01/2026

The `aria-label` is "Live event happening now: NFL Playoffs" - something live streaming related? That was a thing they announced recently

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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 · 14/01/2026

Didn't you hear? We're doing install.md now, so you get all the insecurity of running a random bash script, with all the terrifying stochasticity of an LLM in one "makes you want to tear your eyes out" package

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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 · 09/12/2025

Mandatory reading that should be included in the UK citizenship pack

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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 19/11/2025

That feature was a major cause of a friend and me having a split for a while when he saw what I _really_ thought before deleting it 😂

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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

Maybe just for a certain age then 🤭

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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!

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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 · 27/02/2025

Even I forgot they did that 😂 What a weird acquisition

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Colin Douch @colindou.ch · 26/02/2025

Hey, I'm not saying Nagios was _perfect_, but man I feel old having to explain anything non Prometheus to folks

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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

This is the internet. If you don't know one, you can find one. It's really not that hard - there's even a dedicated subreddit if that's your thing

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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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