Your logs are lying to you - metrics are meaner and better.

Everyone loves logs… until the incident postmortem reads like bad fan fiction.
Most teams start with expensive log aggregation, full-text searching their way into oblivion. So much noise. So little signal. And still, no clue what actually happened. Why? Because writing meaningful logs is a lost art.
Logs are like candles, nice for mood lighting, useless in a house fire.

If you need traces to understand your system, congratulations: you're already in hell.

Let me introduce my favourite method: real-time, metric-driven user simulation aka "Overwatch".

Here's how you do it:

Set up a service that runs real end-to-end user workflows 24/7. Use Cypress, Playwright, Selenium… your poison of choice.
Every action creates a timed metric tagged with the user workflow and action.
Now you know exactly what a user did before everything went up in flames.

Use Grafana + InfluxDB (or other tools you already use) to build dashboards that actually tell stories:

* How fast are user workflows?
* Which steps are breaking, and how often?
* What's slower today than yesterday?
* Who's affected, and where?

Alerts now mean something.
Incidents become surgical strikes, not scavenger hunts.
Bonus: run the same system on every test environment and detect regressions before deployment. And if you made it reusable, you can even run the service to do load tests.

No need to buy overpriced tools. Just build a small service like you already do, except this one might save your soul.

And yes, transform logs into metrics where possible. Just hash your PII data and move on.

Stop guessing. Start observing.
Metrics > Logs. Always.

Recently, I needed to find a way to convert webpages into PDFs, and I discovered that Selenium offers a straightforward solution! Unfortunately, neither ChatGPT nor my initial Google search provided useful results, so I decided to write a short post about it:

https://dnlzrgz.com/blog/webpages-to-pdf-selenium

New research explores #selenium's potential in cancer treatment. A Phase 1 clinical trial found combining selenium with #chemotherapy effectively treated metastatic kidney cancer, with over half of patients seeing tumor shrinkage.
https://buff.ly/3Db0Jeq

New research explores #selenium's potential in cancer treatment. A Phase 1 clinical trial found combining selenium with #chemotherapy effectively treated metastatic kidney cancer, with over half of patients seeing tumor shrinkage. https://theconversation.com/selenium-is-an-essential-nutrient-named-after-the-greek-goddess-of-the-moon-crucial-to-health-it-may-help-prevent-and-treat-cancer-248548
By Aliasger K. Salem, University of Iowa

Dai siti fatti con Wix non si può esportare NULLA in blocco. Escamotage con #Python più framework #selenium + download Manager #aria2c e scarico anche le mutande del fondatore di #Wix

Есть какой-то сайт или, не знаю, как это называется, web-приложение, с которым мне часто приходится работать, тыкать в него мышкой довольно долго и регулярно.
Насколько я понимаю, публичного api у него него нет, написать скрипт, чтобы делать всё из сосноли я не могу.
Я мог бы посмотреть в Firefox, какого рода запросы-ответы он отправляет на сервер, и повторить это самому из сосноли? Это реально? вообще, это стандартная практика так делать? (А потом они поменяют api и у меня всё развалится).
Я мог бы взять selenium, и заставить мышкой тыкать его.
А вот был бы ИИ-помощник, который бы посмотрел, что я делаю, и либо сам бы стал это делать, либо выдал мне скрипт для сосноли.
Вряд ли в десктопном линуксе такое скоро появится. #web #AI #selenium #ИИ

MacでSeleniumを実行させてブログを開いてみた
https://dev.classmethod.jp/articles/mac-selenium-python/

If I run Selenium (from Java) with firefox, I get "WARNING: CDP support for Firefox is deprecated and will be removed in future versions. Please switch to WebDriver BiDi." Fine. Except I can't find any clue about what I should do to use the BiDi driver as a local web driver. I find some things about using it remotely, but that's not helpful. Am I overlooking the obvious? #Selenium #Firefox

A co powiecie na jakieś gówniane narzędzie #AI do szukania błędów w łatkach, które twierdzi, że w moim TOML-u brakuje zamknięcia listy, bo owe gówno "widzi" tylko cztery pierwsze jej elementy?

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pull/15128#issuecomment-2605090127

Cóż, nigdy nie uważałem #Selenium za szczególnie dobrej jakości bibliotekę (no ale męczy się z trudnym tematem), ale teraz już powiem wprost: trzymajcie się od tego projektu z daleka.

How about using some crappy #AI pull request review tool that claims that my TOML is missing a closing bracket because it apparently "sees" only the first four list items?

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pull/15128#issuecomment-2605090127

Well, I never considered #Selenium to be particularly good quality (well, it's a hard domain), but at this point I'm going to say: stay away.

Jane Gibson (1924-2008) was a microbiologist/biochemist who studied photosynthetic bacteria. Before her work, selenium was only known to be toxic; afterwards, its status was known to be a matter of balance. She was at the forefront of the molecular sequencing era of bioinformatic analysis. To honour her great contributions to microbial physiology and biochemistry, DSMZ researchers named the strain Streptomyces gibsoniae (DSM 41699) after her.

While doing my latest data puzzle project, I hit a performance issue with #selenium on my Mac, but *not* my Thinkpad.

I wrote up initial findings here:
https://mclare.blog/posts/why-is-multithreading-selenium-lousy-on-macos/

But I won't have time to investigate further until after the holidays and move