gRPC

I’ve heard of gRPC for quite some time, ran many applications in my life as a platform engineer that had gRPC endpoints, but never directly contributed to it. gRPC is coming up more frequently now that I’m working as a backend engineer, and I feel like I need to dive deeper into the fundamentals. The code is intuitive enough to update existing handlers. But what happens if you need to create a new handler? Or if you need to update how the client is initialized?

Faro

Disclaimer! I work at Grafana Labs and am writing this in my personal time to explore the product

I want to monitor traffic to this site and do it in a way that maintains privacy. In the past I’ve used Google Analytics, which I’m opting not to use due to the amount of data collected.

Here are some of the things I’d like to track:

• How many users visited my website, broken down by page
• How long does a user stay?
• How much data is transmitted?
• How well does the page perform?

Since I work at Grafana, I am biased towards using Grafana Faro.

Squarespace

I use squarespace for markpoko.dev’s DNS records, though not by choice. Up until 2024, I had used Google domains to handle my DNS thingy. At the time it made sense as I was diving deep into learning GCP. There was a nice integration between Cloud Run and Google Domains, making it trivial to expose services over a DNS entry. As Google does, the project was shut down and sold off to Squarespace.

Hello World

Hello, world