I like to put stickers on things

I like to put stickers on things. I like to put stickers on things because it’s a good way to keep things organized and know stuff at a glance. My first internship in college was part of the governance team for a commercial insurance company. It was a closed program too, only two of us on that team, rare air. We spent the vast majority of our time cataloging input fields in Salesforce across the department to try to build relationships between our internal systems. Before you faint, I know, it really was riveting work.

Yeah, it wasn’t the most interesting work I’ve ever done in life but it was the first time I had ever heard about data governance. In my years as a typist, I haven’t met many people who are familiar with the subject beyond deducing the concept from the name itself. Again, I know, it’s not the sexiest thing in the world but I’ll tell you what, neither is observability but you either have someone working on it or you’re going to hope you did soon enough.

I’ve had my fair share of late night alerts, plenty of migration pains, and I’ve spent a lot of time in my life proving that it, in fact, is not a problem on our side of the integration, for the love of God just go look at your logs!

In all of these situations, the only thing standing between the answer and me becoming a farmer is metadata of some sort, usually span attributes or log extras but sometimes resource tags too. Modern tooling and systems provide tons of blank stickers to write whatever you want on them, literally anything, make it up if you want, it doesn’t matter! I think it’s a great hobby and a great time, especially in a world where it’s so easy to get caught snacking on work that doesn’t matter, I’ve always found at least some value in labeling.