This makes me wonder if there's something similar for log files. I sometimes find myself doing adhoc analysis of live logs using visual cues, but auditory ones are really powerful - just never think of using sound for diagnosis/debugging purposes.
A plugin for graphana or datadog/similar would be amazing. a ping at one frequency for a request hitting the load balancer, a ping at a different frequencies for a request hitting a given endpoint, a bloop for a request hitting Kafka/the queue, a tone that lasts for as long as the job takes to process the job. a bong for a request hitting the db lasting as long as the query takes. the combined cacofony of sound would grow to feel comfortable when the site is properly operational. and then, with it just sitting open in the background, if something is off, someone could immediately tell without sitting there watching graphs when their brain subconsciously says something happened to the usual pitter patter of the machine operating.
There's a small "settings" button to the left of the URL. Click it, and if it shows Sound already, enable it. Otherwise, click "Site settings" and enable it from that list.
I am having trouble making it work on Firefox. I guess I could add an option to show a little button. Playing audio is allowed, it's the autoplay aspect that isn't.
Most browsers will accept a mouse click or screen tap as user action which allows audio playback. I've used overlays to solve this problem, for example on https://cafegoblin.com (shameless plug for my friend's zine)
There's also https://github.com/tomhicks/react-audible-debug which has been around for some time, I think it has a clearer sound for identifying excessive re-renders, but it's definitely a little more annoying :)
Back in the day when computers were slow (like, megahertz slow) you could do this with code execution to help with debugging. If you played with a piece of code long enough you'd get very familiar with the patterns (they were tones, not just ticks) and it was easy to tell when something was off / different.
And later, when computers weren't so slow but still required multiple fans and HDDs (using real metal discs!) you got an auditory indication of resource utilisation. I do wonder what we'll say in the future when we look back at computers from this time - perhaps it won't be so much an auditory clue, but the subtle feel of one's phone getting warm in your hand when it is running all cores at full clock?
Thank you! It was just thinking of ways to get notified of unnecessary re-renders in a way that would be tolerable to have enabled most of the time. Polluting the console or showing visual cues didn't really fit that, so this came up.
This makes me wonder if there's something similar for log files. I sometimes find myself doing adhoc analysis of live logs using visual cues, but auditory ones are really powerful - just never think of using sound for diagnosis/debugging purposes.