End of 2018 link dump

Things I've had open in tabs to read, some of which may be of interest to you!

Nick Craver - Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring - 2018 Edition

Seriously, read it. There's a lot you can take away from this post, and basically all of it you can implement for your own systems as well. It's an epic put together on how to do monitoring and for sites that are processing absurd amounts of traffic

Serverfault - How to programatically cause a new Windows user's profile to be created?

This is something I needed to do quite a while ago, somehow I landed on the post a few days ago which means I can now re-visit the bodgy work-aroundy mcHack that's currently in place. Awesome.

How to deliver negative feedback well: The 4 things that good managers do (that bad managers don’t) 

Giving positive feedback is easy, but giving negative feedback is more important. Being able to give it in a way that works is essential. This is a really good read about how to do that

Gulp 4: The new task execution system - gulp.parallel and gulp.series

Something I've had to get to grips with over the past year is Gulp, specifically Gulp 4 and the differences between it and its predecessor. Mainly because of a badly written build script that relies on an alpha release of Gulp 4. Such fun!

Stackoverflow - New Azure VM says InvalidQueryParameterValue comp

Not because I'm remotely interested in the question itself, but because this answer is the only one that pointed me in the right direction when Azure static website hosting was throwing the message "Value for one of the query parameters specified in the request URI is invalid" at me for no apparent reason.