21 November 2025 · Journal

When not to instrument

Privacy-aware InstrumentationRestraint

Workshop with sticky notes on a glass wall and people in discussion

Every new event is a promise to explain it later. Most teams already owe explanations they cannot give. Adding tooltip_hovered because the design file had a tooltip is how dictionaries rot.

Skip the fire when you cannot name a decision that would change if the count moved. Skip it when the property would identify a person more precisely than the feature requires — UK GDPR is not a mood, it is a constraint. Skip it when the engineer would have to lie about client time to make the event “complete”.

Capture is not the same as collect-everything

The Atlas starts with capture so we see the mess. It does not instruct you to enlarge the mess. A Pulse Briefing often ends with a list of events to stop sending. Students find that more surprising than any dashboard theme.

If you want a seat in the seminar that treats this as the whole subject, it is listed on the programmes page as Privacy-aware Instrumentation.

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