Mark Provan - Mark Provan

Mark Provan

Mark Provan

Instrumenting Rails with OpenTelemetry - Part 1

Software Engineering Featured

Instrumenting Rails with OpenTelemetry - Part 1

Since I began my career in software, application instrumentation is one thing that has stayed a top priority over almost every project I have worked on. Having good, comprehensive data on how applications are running, clear indicators of when and things are breaking and a centralised place to store this

Le Tour Up North: Day 3

Le Tour Up North: Day 3

When I was planning this adventure I was worried about the first two days, packing in some big miles to give myself breathing room later in the week. I wasn’t worried at all about my so called “rest day”, a short fifty mile middle section to give myself a

Le Tour Up North: Day 2

Le Tour Up North: Day 2

Waking on day two, the first thing I noticed was the chill in the air. At just over 1000 feet above sea level, it wasn’t the highest point of the trip, but I was the highest point I’d be camping at for the week. I was slightly concerned

Le Tour Up North: Day 1

Le Tour Up North: Day 1

On the 31st August 2020, I set off from MediaCityUK in Salford, to travel back to Pacific Quay on Glasgow on my bike. I wanted to raise money for Children in Need, so I took a slightly different route to the one that would take me directly home as quickly

Reflecting on Close Calls

Software Engineering

Reflecting on Close Calls

I’d imagine most people reading this are aware of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) meetings. Maybe you know them better as Postmortems. If you’ve not attended one or heard of the concept before, RCAs are meetings following an incident that resulted in unexpected outcome in a system. They can

Chasing Long Shadows

Cycling Featured

Chasing Long Shadows

Having not ridden with Colin since this years edition of the Five Ferries (Le Cinque Bateaux in 2021 for sponsorship reasons), it was a welcome WhatsApp notification when he asked if I fancied a pre-Christmas spin. We initially planned to meet at the Whitelee Windfarm, to explore the expansive gravel

Running Ghost on CoreOS with Docker

Software Engineering

Running Ghost on CoreOS with Docker

I’ve been wanting get my personal site back up, as well as write more for a wee while now, and finally got round to taking the plunge after seeing Ghost’s incredible new 1.0 features. Not being one to miss a chance to try new things, I saw

Managing Infrastructure on Digital Ocean with Terraform

Software Engineering

Managing Infrastructure on Digital Ocean with Terraform

As a general fan of the approach “automate all the things” I decided it was time to do a little more work on this blog. I wanted to be able to setup my blog, from datacentre to browser in one command. I decided to go with Terraform as a method