Noise, Memory, and the Language of Networks
On LinkedIn my posts may be long, but I try to keep them within the groove of technical and professional. Here, my mind is a little more free — well, maybe a lot more free.
Take BroadSoft logs for example. They’re like a Java error dump that got drunk and fell off a cliff. Multiline chaos, overlapping, nested in different streams, but each one still begins with a line you can anchor to. If you know that, you can split it, parse it, tame it with the least number of grok rules possible. It’s messy, but not meaningless. That’s the trick. The drunk gibberish, if you stare at it long enough, actually has a rhythm.
And that’s where my head goes every time I’m staring at these logs, or tickets, or SNMP traps. What does any of this really mean? Why does it matter? Because data, at its core, is nothing but the fossil record of human intent colliding with systems. A phone call made, a packet dropped, a technician rolling a truck — each one leaving a trace, an imprint. By itself, each trace is noise. Together, they form a story.
CodexMCP was never just software. It was an attempt at translation. To take all those fossils — logs, traps, notes, metrics — and read them not as disconnected events, but as the mythology of a network. Codex was, is, and might always be a language exercise. Not in the sense of English versus German, but in the sense of decoding the grammar of reality itself: what happened, why, and how the system experienced it.
Most people see data as numbers or lines on a screen. I see it as memory. Collective memory. A network remembers its own life through the messages it emits, just as we remember ours through journals, scars, photographs. A bounced ONT isn’t just a device glitching — it’s a neuron misfiring in the brain of the telco. A series of SIP cancels isn’t just call setup noise — it’s a stutter in the voice of communication itself.
The absurdity, of course, is that I spend hours and years building pipelines to make this visible, while the world at large shrugs. To most, it’s just IT work. To me, it’s almost sacred. Because beneath the noise is a chance to glimpse order. A chance to pull back the curtain and say: this is not random. These patterns carry meaning. They are the fingerprints of both failure and resilience.
Will CodexMCP ever be finished? Probably not. Because it’s not really a tool — it’s a way of thinking. It began in my lab, evolved in my head, and now leaks out through every system I touch. And maybe that’s the point. It’s not about an end state. It’s about the act of seeing, of refusing to let noise remain noise.
So yes, BroadSoft logs look like a Java dump that fell off a cliff. But maybe cliffs are where language begins. Maybe out of those broken lines, those multiline errors, the real stories emerge — the stories that tell us not just what the network is doing, but what we are doing with it, to it, through it. And maybe, just maybe, those stories outlast the network itself.
-Quite a Ride, Try it Sometime
--Bryan