Open Source – Software / Wetware

Getting started with OpenTelemetry .NET(5 min read)

OpenTelemetry has quickly established itself as the standard observability framework, and is now supported by every major observability platform and programming language, including Microsoft .NET.

The .NET libraries provide instrumentation across a wide range of components, and connection options to many observability platforms, either via the standard OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), custom connectors, or the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Using observability platforms, whilst powerful, require infrastructure setup that can slow down getting started.

This article introduces the Essential OpenTelemetry Colored Console exporter, allowing you to use OpenTelemetry in your .NET projects from day one, supporting development without needing any additional infrastructure, while setting you up for future access to the entire rich OpenTelemetry ecosystem.

Continue reading Getting started with OpenTelemetry .NET(5 min read)

AGENTS.md standardisation for agentic coding systems(5 min read)

I am amazed at the speed of change in the industry.

Having started to use agentic coding on several open source projects I was appalled at the divergence of different names for instruction files.

Just over a week ago, I started to plan a project to try and at least standarise the open source projects, picking ChatGPT / OpenAI Codex AGENTS.md as the best option of a generic name (and avoid creating new standards).

I didn't get to do much until this weekend, and spent the time creating the Agent Rules (https://agent-rules.org/) microsite and raising feature requests with various open source projects.

My approach is fairly light-weight, based on projects like Editor Config, Semantic Versioning, and Conventional Commits).

This drew out a few comments that, following down the rabbit hole, it looks like the approach from Codex has already gained traction (within the last week) and will become the standard.

A lot of the discussion was on X, so I asked Grok to summarise the timeline and at how fast this has moved.

Continue reading AGENTS.md standardisation for agentic coding systems(5 min read)

Hands-on with Augment Code(3 min read)

Augment Code, one of the new AI-powered coding assistants, promises to make software development faster and more intuitive. But does it hold up in real-world scenarios, beyond demo apps and sample code?

Open source software provides a great opportunity to learn these tools with real code, solving real problems. Plus you get to contribute back to the community.

I decided to put Augment Code through its paces by solving a practical improvement I wanted to make to the pysunspec2 project, involving home IoT devices and solar energy controllers.

Continue reading Hands-on with Augment Code(3 min read)

Deployment ready NB-IoT device review — Unboxing the Dragino N95S31B(14 min read)

The Dragino NBSN95/NBSN95A family is a deployment-ready range of water resistant NB-IoT (Narrow Band Internet of Things) devices that are available pre-packaged with various sensors such as soil moisture, distance detection, liquid level, and temperature/humidity sensors.

NB-IoT is a Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technology that allows devices to be accessed in remote locations and operate on battery for long periods of time, up to many years.

In this article we will look a the N95S31B, the model with the pre-packaged temperature/humidity sensors, the strengths and weaknesses of the device, and then walk through configuing the device and see it connect to an MQTT test server. Our previous article showed you how to set up an MQTT test server on Azure if needed.

The NBSN95 is an open source project, with both the software and hardware specifications available, if you need to customise the application. We have also previously reviewed the Dragion LDDS75 LoRaWAN device.

Continue reading Deployment ready NB-IoT device review — Unboxing the Dragino N95S31B(14 min read)

Instrumenting .NET with OpenTelemetry(15 min read)

In this post we will cover how to the the built in support for OpenTelemetry in modern .NET to instrument your distributed application for tracing and logging, how the OpenTelemetry Collector can be used to simplify instrumention, and how the OpenTelemetry Protocol is building a (brilliant) connected future.

We have already seen how distributed tracing is supported in .NET via W3C Trace Context propagation, with automatic (or mostly automatic) support across HttpClient calls and messaging.

We will now go further than logging and look at tracing. Tracing looks at the different units of work (spans) done during an operation (trace), how they are connected, and the timings of the different components. This is an important tool for investigating performance issues in distributed systems.

An example distributed trace timeline, across multiple components, viewed in Jaeger, one of many supported tools:

As well as looking at individual traces timings can be aggregated across the system to find the slowest areas, and identify anomalies.

Continue reading Instrumenting .NET with OpenTelemetry(15 min read)

Unboxing the Dragino LPS8 LoRaWAN gateway(8 min read)

I recently got a Dragino LPS8 LoRaWAN gateway and set it up on my network. The LPS stands for LoRaWAN Pico Station.

The open source gateway runs a variant of OpenWRT and the latest version supports a range of LoRaWAN features including Basic Station. You can use it for a private network or set it up with a community as I did for The Things Network (TTN).

Unboxing the Dragino LPS8 LoRaWAN gateway

Read on for details of how easy it was to set it up securely.