Linux

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OpenTelemetry and in particular I wish more protocols had Traceparent propagation support and more software had support for sending spans and traces to an OTLP endpoint to construct a full picture of everything that is going on in a distributed system.

There are a bunch of message broker services out there, and having a consistent set of common keys along with a documented process for transforming events to/from different systems means that this kind of data can move through different systems without getting mangled. It does have a spec for JSON, so it can be considered just a standardized JSON blob with transformation rules. But it also has a protobuf spec, specs for MQTT, NATS, HTTP, Avro, etc. It’s a common language for all these systems.

I wish Microsoft Office would use the .odf standard by default. Or, failing that, it'd implement its own published .docx specification correctly, so other office suites can be compatible.

Markdown. Its only in tech-spaces that its preferred, but it should be used everywhere. You can even write full books and academic papers in markdown (maybe with only a few extensions like latex / mathjax).

Instead, in a lot of fields, people are passing around variants of microsoft word documents with weird formatting and no standardization around headings, quotes, and comments.

I've been playing with MQTT on meshtastic. I really hope LoRa and meshtastic continue to grow.

IOT devices shouldn't connect to wifi. ZWave or zigbee is much better suited to IOT stuff, but it seems to mostly get adopted in very limited, locked down proprietary shit like Hue Lights.

RCS compatibility between iOS and Android operating systems

OpenTelemetry everywhere please

IPv6. Lack of IPv4 addresses it's a problem, specially in poorer countries. But still lots of servers and ISPs don't support it natively. And what is worse. Lots of sysadmins don't want to learn it.

NBD (Network Block Device), it's like a remote hard drive.

I wish people used email for chat more. SMTP is actually a pretty great protocol for real time communication. People think of it as this old slow protocol, but that’s mostly because the big email providers make it slow. Gmail, by default, waits ten seconds before it even tries to send your message to the recipient’s server. And even then, most of them do a ridiculous amount of processing on your messages that it usually takes several seconds from the time it receives a message to the time it shows up in your account.

There’s a project called Delta Chat that makes email look and act like a chat app. If you have a competent email service, I think it’s better than texting. It doesn’t stomp on the images you send like SMS and Facebook do, everyone has it unlike all the proprietary services, and you can run your own server for it that interacts with everyone else’s servers.

Unfortunately, Google, Microsoft, etc all block you if you try to run your own server “to protect against spam”. Really, I’m convinced that’s just anticompetitive behavior. The fewer players are allowed to enter the email market, the less competition Gmail and Outlook will have.

As much as I like ProtonMail too, unfortunately their encryption models prevents it from working with Delta Chat. I’d love to see Proton make a compatible chat app that works with their service.

I made an email service called Port87 that I’m working on making compatible with Delta chat too. I’d love to see people using email the way it was originally meant to be used, to talk to each other, without being controlled by big businesses.

RFC 2549 is such an important improvement over RFC 1149. Everyone should adopt the updated standard.