I work with a shorebird expert who has been tracking migrations (Latham snipe whose range extends from Russia/Northern Japan to Southern Australia).

I think an early technique of tracking their migration before gps/chip/batteries were small enough was a primitive light sensor + data logger that would log day/night hours on the bird as it flew from island to island and the light data was enough to roughly estimate lattitute (and often enough to infer a location/date.

The data looked great in this form. It wasn't hourglass but with jagged edges and shifts. You could easily see which months the bird stayed in a single place for several days etc. clever stuff.

Snipe, huh? Will you be organizing a Snipe-Hunt any time soon?

nice. had no idea about that connnotation :) ... goes with black swan event as a saying that's ill fitting for these parts (in southern Australia all we have are black swans).

I'm using a slightly different method. Vimwiki diary and a code block runner (runs in another tmux window)... so it's doubling as a (markdown/html) documentation generator of all my work.

I'm actually enjoying it as it's providing a lot of context on the time and notes/discussion on every command I run. Also good for history searches as regular cli history ultimately relies on your own memory.

Still it feels like you need to already have paid your dues... (I'm 20+ years in...) .

I've recently started working in this space. Loads of applications in research, Ag tech and environmental science and it's mostly using this tech stack (as well as GeoServer.) Definitely a nice change from my typical ecommerce/saas work. Working with some long term geo/surveyor types and they seem happy with the open source offerings.

The best way to stop doing it accidentally is to start doing it deliberately, then the muscle memory will catch up.

I just managed to get it working on an ipads iVim python environment which is pretty crippled (no compiler etc).

perhaps... "Never ascribe to stupidity that which can be explained by laziness"

The Unexploded ordinance teams (UXO) do an amazing job. I was there backpacking in 2004 on a bus and was stopped in a traffic jam on a remote mountain side, loads of army looking people about. I had no idea what was going on and the locals couldn't explain... then a huge blast went off up the hill. What was striking was 1. how close the thing was to a village, 2. How dense the jungle was around the area for these things to hide and 3. How normal this process seemed to the locals looking at their reactions.

I usually set up nginx to "default ignore" and only respond to specific paths which I can name... works for api only domains at any rate. just use an explicit subfolder like /api/ ... cuts down on the noise.

    location / {
            return 444;
            access_log off;
    }

    location /a/ {
       ...
    }

Can't do that when 404's are expected from actual customers. I need to redirect 404 to /

yeah depends on your site structure.. you could always stop the logging (or log to a different file) but return a human 404 with links to legit routes etc. the main thing is to remove the noise so you can focus on the more targeted probing.

Thats fine. The main thing is not to confuse technique with repertoire.. like a musical instrument, putting time in to mastering scales and finger technique will get you a lot of finesse in tackling musical pieces but it's the quality of your repertoire (in this context the algorithms/languages/higher problem solving knowledge) is what will be what gets you the money. Still a practising a few scales every now and then...

I recommend repr in all log messages too. For a work Django project we have common BaseModel repr(obj) expression that can be easily converted (using regexes in loki and promtail) into a clickable admin link.

So within loki (or any similar log tools) all logger.info(repr(object)) is a link straight to the admin. Worth the set up time.