From what I can tell, nearly everyone struggles with their Home Network sooner or later. Having gone through numerous routers and setups, I am going to be posting a series of articles on the subject, with one goal: how to get the best out of your Internet Provider Connection.

I know you are tired of COVID and social distancing. We all are. But — are you also tired of the old job? Ready to do something fun, learn something new, work with great people, AND serve open source community at large? Doesn’t get much better than that.

The decision of which framework or language to choose from is not a simple one and rests on both the company values and project values. For simplicity’s sake, we can refer to values or priorities.

This post is about a software engineering process most similar to what is practiced by Pivotal Labs consultancy, with some SCRUM sprinkled in, and with some tweaks and adjustments applied.

You may or may not know that I love writing CLI utilities in Ruby and open-sourcing them as ruby gems. You can install a ruby gem with gem install name on nearly any UNIX system, including a Mac.

Test your understanding of how Ruby Concurrency works with these two simple multiple-choice questions.

Overview of Bazel support in IntelliJ Family of products, and instructions on how to build the plugin from sources.

In this post we’ll explore some of the things that a beginner C++ programmers (but not general beginner programmers) might find useful in getting quickly up to speed.

In this short post I describe the read-only file system issue that happened to one of our C5 hosts, and how we fixed it.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of application secrets, how important it is is not to commit those to your version control system, and how challenging it is to distribute development and production secrets across the dev team in a consistent and, most importantly, secure fashion. In this post we introduce a new Ruby Gem called 'Sym' for symmetric encryption.

This gem implements a flexible time-ordered activity feeds commonly used within social networking applications. As events occur, they are pushed into the Feed and distributed to all users that need to see the event. Upon the user visiting their 'feed page', a pre-populated ordered list of events is returned by the library.

Wrestling with Native Instruments Traktor file management — playlists and organizing music.

With this post, I’d like to start a series of DevOps-related conversations about building distributed applications (read: common web-apps). Folks running enterprise application use different technologies and are hosted across a range of cloud providers, and yet are often faced with very similar problems.

MixMax enhances, enriches, extends (EEE!) the standard Gmail functionality with a lot of goodies, accessible from both the GUI as well as via the slash commands while composing an email.

In this exciting and informative talk, presented at PgConf Silicon Valley 2015, Konstantin cut through the theory to deliver a clear set of practical solutions for scaling applications atop PostgreSQL, eventually supporting millions of active users, tens of thousands concurrently, and with the application stack that responds to requests with a 100ms average.

In this post I’ll share a method that I use to connect to a Serial port of any Arduino I am using at any given moment. This method has a caveat, in that if you have more than one Arduino connected, it will pick one of them at random.

Its about time we talked about my other obsession — music. You might now this, but I’ve produced and released two albums on iTunes and CDBaby. More info inside.

Recent versions of cheap Arduino clones have been coming out with a different USB/Serial chip, which replaces the usual FTDI. The chipset is called CH340G and this post explains how to install the drivers for it on both Mac and Windows.

LaserCutter & MakeABox.io — its a ruby gem and a website for making PDF designs of laser-cut boxes, which fit/snap in together at all edges using tabs that go in and out. The output of the library is a PDF document. Typically next step would import that PDF into Adobe Illustrator for additions and touch ups, and then sent off to a laser cutter for the actual, well, cutting.

Occupus (formerly BORAT: Bathroom Occupancy Remote Awareness Technology) – is an Arduino-based restroom occupancy detection and rapid notification system based on a network of nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz RF radios. It supports multiple (up to 5) casters (each installed in a bathrooms) and a single reporting unit.

Review of Arduino IDE Alternatives.

Review of the list of books on being a Maker that I’ve been reading and thoroughly enjoying.

In this post I share the story of how I got myself into Hardware programming with Arduino.

Back Seat Driver is a library for programming autonomous (or not) Arduino based robots. This library provides a convenient non-blocking command API to programmatically drive an autonomous vehicle. Current implementation is aimed at a 2-wheeled robot, with the two Servo motors setup opposite each other. Therefore to move the robot forward (or backward), two Servos need to rotate in the opposite direction (this is certainly true in the current version of the library, but may be more flexible in the future if need arises).

In this exciting and informative talk, presented at PgConf Silicon Valley 2015, Konstantin cut through the theory to deliver a clear set of practical solutions for scaling applications atop PostgreSQL, eventually supporting millions of active users, tens of thousands concurrently, and with the application stack that responds to requests with a 100ms average. He will share how his team solved one of the biggest challenges they faced: effectively storing and retrieving over 3B rows of 'saves' (a Wanelo equivalent of Instagram’s likes or Pinterest’s pins), all in PostgreSQL, with highly concurrent random access.

With any Rails app that evolves along with substantial user growth and active feature development, pretty soon a moment comes when there appears to be a decent amount of tangled logic, AKA technical debt.

In this post, I’ll go over some of our settings in postgresql.conf, which have been adjusted for high-performance/throughput and large RAM sizes. I would like to credit Josh Berkus and his PGExperts consultancy for providing us with timely and necessary assistance in tuning PostgreSQL these last few months.

In this post I share the story of overcoming a massive scalability bottleneck from too many writes ino the Analytics database table used for Event collection, using Vertical Sharding.

In this post we share the details of what we did and what we learned, in case someone out there ever finds themselves in a similar situation, weighing the risks of either working with a legacy stack or going full steam ahead with a rewrite.