Inklings: a tumblelog

Server daemons (such as PostgreSQL or Nginx) and applications (such as a Rails or Django app) sometimes offer a configuration parameter for a path to the program’s logfile. This can lead us to think of logs as files.

But a better conceptual model is to treat logs as time-ordered streams: there is no beginning or end, but rather an ongoing, collated collection of events which we may wish to view in realtime as they happen (e.g. via tail -f or heroku logs --tail) or which we may wish to search in some time window (e.g. via grep or Splunk).