We shipped a small update to our monitoring platform Observ.io this week, showing the TTL (/hop) in traceroutes. It's but a small thing, but I'm really happy it landed, mostly because of the history here.

When I first launched Where's it Up, it looks like this:

I built the backend for exactly the problem I was solving. One of the things I wanted to do in the frontend was to highlight different hops (not display their count), so the results it generated included a flipping 0 and 1 so I could zebra-stripe my table. This legacy is still around, and shows up in the WIU response.

Getting this data into Observ.io involved ripping open a backend that's remained largely unchanged for years (pulling up history in git shows the file is older than the repo it lives in now), finding (and fixing) a few bugs that have been around for ages, and adding something much more helpful in it's place. The diff for the fixes show a lot of ripped out code, and something much easier to understand being dropped into place.

I'm really happy to see this code getting some love, and watch the errors of my past be slowly ground down. I'll be even happier when we can deprecate that 0/1.