Marcus Olsson

Writing

I write to make sense of the world, both for myself and for others to learn from my experiences. In these 22 articles, I share insights from what I've learned so far.

Published on marcus.se.net

How I set and track goals using Obsidian

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been setting and documenting goals for myself. In this article, I’ll walk you through how I plan and track my professional and personal goals in Obsidian.
Published on Grafana Labs

Learn Grafana: Share query results between panels to reduce load time

As you add more panels to your dashboard, more requests are being made, potentially leading to your dashboard taking longer to load. While you can limit the data requested in each query, one of the best ways to reduce the loading time is to reduce the number of requests being made to the data source.
Published on marcus.se.net

Beginner-friendly issues

One of the first pieces of advice that aspiring contributors get when looking to contribute to their first open source project is to search for “beginner-friendly issues”. Learn what makes a great beginner-friendly issue.
Published on Grafana Labs

Popular community plugins that can improve your Grafana dashboards

Since the release of Grafana v7.0, we’ve seen a lot more developers taking advantage of the new plugins platform, which helps them build high-quality custom plugins faster than ever. Not only does this allow them to create their own custom visualizations and data source integrations—taking the Grafana experience to the next-level—but by sharing them with the community, they’re able to help others do the same.
Published on Grafana Labs

Learn Grafana: How to build a scatter plot plugin in Grafana 7.0

There are a lot of great things about Grafana 7.0, but one of my favorite features is the new React-based plugin platform, which has a set of new APIs and design system to help you build your own plugin. The process is easier and faster than ever. In this blog post, I’ll show how you can create a panel plugin for visualizing scatter plots.
Published on Grafana Labs

Plugin showcase: The hourly heatmap panel, built on Grafana's new plugin platform

Grafana 7.0 introduced a brand new React-based platform, along with a set of improved APIs for building plugins. Since I knew some React from previous projects, I wrote my first Grafana plugin that would adapt the original Carpet plot to the new plugin platform. I’ve called it Hourly heatmap, and in this blog post, I’d like to quickly introduce what it does and how it can be helpful.
Published on Grafana Labs

Learn Grafana: How to automatically repeat rows and panels in dynamic dashboards

Running your software on dynamic infrastructure means that your monitoring platform needs to change dynamically. Variables let you reuse a single dashboard for all your services. Select the service you want to inspect from a drop-down menu, and watch panels update to only show you metrics from that service. A common use case for variables is to filter data within a panel. In this blog post, we’ll look at how you can dynamically add and remove entire panels through a feature called repeated panels.
Published on Grafana Labs

WFH tips: Slack hacks that will make you more productive

As the work-from-home culture continues to reshape many people’s lives, the team at Grafana Labs has been sharing tips, tricks, and hacks we have learned as a remote-first company. One tool that has been vital to our internal communications and team building is Slack. If you’ve been using Slack in an office setting, you might find using Slack in a remote setting can be a new experience. Here are some of the best practices we use on Slack for seamless communication and to actually get work done.
Published on Grafana Labs

Learn Grafana: How to use dual axis graphs

You’re done setting up your first graph panels. You want to do more, look around the visualization settings, and discover the settings for the X and Y axes. You stumble over the configuration for a “Right Y” axis. You ask yourself, “Why on earth would I need another Y axis?”
Published on Grafana Labs

Pro Tips: Dashboard Navigation Using Links

Great dashboards answer a limited set of related questions. If you try to answer too many questions in a single dashboard, it can become overly complex. As a consequence, a single dashboard often can’t tell the whole story. So you end up navigating between several, and it can be quite inefficient to search for a particular dashboard every time you need it. Luckily, there are some hacks for navigating between dashboards.
Published on Medium

Adding context and options to your Go client package

This is a follow-up on my previous post where I showed how you can write user-friendly client packages for REST APIs that will make it even more enjoyable for users to integrate with your services. And for many services, the patterns I showed will probably suffice. This time though, we’ll take a look at two additional patterns. First, I’ll show you how you can bring your client package up-to-date by adding support for the context package.
Published on marcus.se.net

Notes on my GolangUK 2016 talk

I’m writing this on the way home from GolangUK where I did a talk on Building an Enterprise Service in Go, based on the DDD Sample App. I was really overwhelmed with the positive feedback I got, some of which came from developers who never heard of DDD prior to my talk. Not totally unexpected however, since it’s an approach to a problem space which I believe Go has yet to conquer, but among the feedback I got were a few valid concerns that I thought I would address in the form of a blog post.
Published on Citerus

Domain Driven Design in Go: Part 3

Up until now, we have only looked at one service in isolation, but this is seldom the case in a service-oriented architecture. For the last post in this blog series on Domain Driven Design in Go we will have a look at how we interact with other services. In particular, we will have a look at two concepts that help us reason about these interactions: application services and bounded contexts.
Published on Medium

Writing a Go client for your RESTful API

By providing your users with a client SDK in their favorite language you are making it even easier to integrate their services with yours. In this blog post I will show you how to write your own client package in Go!
Published on Citerus

Domain Driven Design in Go: Part 2

In my previous post I announced a project I have been tinkering with lately; porting an existing DDD sample application to Go. I elaborated a bit about its background and the general structure of the application. In this post we are going to have a look at some of the implementation aspects that I have encountered so far.
Published on Citerus

Domain Driven Design in Go: Part 1

In 2008, Citerus developed a Java sample application in close collaboration with Eric Evans, based on the examples in his book. The purpose was to showcase the concepts from DDD in a real-world application. Since then, the application has been ported to other languages such as C# and Ruby. Of course, as a DDD practitioner and a Go developer I thought it might be a fun exercise to try porting it to Go.
Published on marcus.se.net

Events and explosions in a distributed system

I did a talk on Event Storming a short while ago where I started off by explaining why state transitions are so much more interesting than the actual states themselves. We had a lot of good discussions afterwards and I felt I wanted to elaborate a little bit further on the theme, in the context of distributed systems.
Published on marcus.se.net

Circuit breaking using hystrix-go

So we have been looking at adding circuit breaking to our services at my current client as part of making them more resilient. We used the fantastic hystrix-go package and since I could not really find any other examples other than the ones in the tests, I thought I might share one.
Published on Citerus

Event Storming - Ett effektivt sätt att utforska affärsprocesser

Upplever du att det finns ett glapp mellan de som förstår verksamheten och de som utvecklar mjukvaran? Genom en enkel övning kan ni utforska er affär, underlätta dialogen mellan de inblandade och samtidigt förbättra kvaliteten på er mjukvara.
Published on marcus.se.net

Thoughts on DDD in Go

When I set out to port the DDD sample application to Go, I had done a couple of minor projects in Go on my spare time. The experience I had got from those projects had been refreshing, to say the least. I felt like I was being more productive than I had ever been in other object-oriented programming languages. But then I got curious.