tracing

It is no secret that I am not a fan of logs; I’ve baited (rapala in work lingo. Rapala is a Finnish brand of fishing lure, and used to mean baiting in this context) discussion in our work chat with things like: If you’re writing log statements, you’re doing it wrong. This is a pretty incendiary statement, and while there has been some good discussion after, I figured it was time to write down why I think logs are bad, why tracing should be used instead, and how we get from one to the other....

Tracking where the time goes in your CI pipeline is an important step towards being able to make it go even faster. Up until somewhat recently, the only way of tracking how long tasks took in CI was either hoping people had wrapped all their commands in time ..., or by reading a timestamped build log and calculating the difference between numbers. Which isn’t great or fun, if we’re being honest....