One of our goals here at Checkly is to make it easier for developers to ship excellent software. But let’s face it, getting features out is only a tiny fraction of the story. Fast-moving development teams also break things. And the more things you build, the more things can go wrong. And trust me, they will. This is where API and end-to-end monitoring helps. Define automated test suites that check all your properties constantly and guarantee that everything’s up and running. All the time.

If you are in a room with 20 engineers and you ask, “explain what an API is to a non-technical person”, you will get 20 different analogies. An API is like the on button to your TV connecting you to a variety of shows and systems, or an API is like a waiter taking your order and serving you from the kitchen. An API is like a library card catalog, or it’s simply a tool that connects you to other tools.

The use of a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) is increasingly common in embedded software designs. An RTOS makes it easy to divide your code into smaller blocks, tasks, which execute seemingly in parallel and independent of each other, as described in the first article in the RTOS 101 series.

Firmware update capability has become a must-have for most devices. Whether to add new features after launch, fix bugs, or urgently patch a security hole, firmware updates gives modern teams the flexibility they need to move fast and react to a changing environment. I’ve written at length about firmware updates in the past, including on Interrupt with a Firmware Update Cookbook and a post about code signing, and even recorded a webinar on the topic.

A Two Sigma engineer explains why we built Tensu, an open source TUI (text user interface)-based program for interacting with Sensu Go’s observability pipeline and backend API. In this article we will be putting a spotlight on Tensu, an open source terminal-based dashboard for interacting with and responding to events from the Sensu Go observability pipeline and backend API.