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    Dec 2024
    Discovering Terraform for DevOps Engineers
    Jun 2021
    Ultra-Fast External SSD Drives: Samsung X5 vs SanDisk Extreme Pro V2
    Jan 2021
    Yes! It's 2021, and Ruby 3.0, and Ruby on Rails 6.1 are...
    Sep 2020
    Turbo Agile™: Optimizing Efficiency of the Engineering Process for Maximum Velocity.
    Sep 2020
    How to Write Awesome CLI tools in Ruby and test them with...
    Jun 2020
    Test your Understanding of Ruby Concurrency
    Mar 2020
    Building IntelliJ Bazel Plugin from Sources
    Sep 2018
    C++ Newbie Tour: Getting Started with C++ on Mac OSX
    May 2018
    C5 class instance on EC2: cannot create file: Read-only file system
    Mar 2017
    Dead Simple Encryption with Sym
    Feb 2017
    Add a Social Activity Feed for your Site in Minutes with the...
    May 2016
    Building Scalable Performant And Cheap Distributed Applications Part 1
    Apr 2016
    Mixmax And My First Nodejs App.
    Nov 2015
    Scaling Web Applications On Postgresql A Walkthrough Presentation
    Nov 2015
    Serial Console Hacks With Arduino
    Dec 2014
    How To Use Arduino Nano Mini Pro With CH340G On Mac Osx...
    Nov 2014
    Announcing Laser Cutter and MakeABox.IO
    Oct 2014
    BORAT: Bathroom Occupancy Remote Awareness Technology with Arduino
    Aug 2014
    Arduino IDE Alternatives
    Jul 2014
    BackSeat Driver: Autonomous Vehicle Library for Arduino
    Mar 2014
    Twelve Step Program For Scaling Web Applications On PostgreSQL
    Aug 2013
    Detangling Business Logic in Rails Apps with PORO Events and Observers
    Feb 2013
    How to configure PostgreSQL for very high read/write throughput
    Feb 2013
    The Case For Vertical Sharding
    Sep 2012
    The Big Switch How We Rebuilt Wanelo From Scratch And Lived To...
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Posts

Dec 2024 Discovering Terraform for DevOps Engineers

Today I’d like to review some of the popular players in the DevOps automation space. Specifically, I want to chat about Terraform, and in particular some of the "gotchas" that might bite you when you start with it, especially if you come from Chef.

  read ❯
Jun 2021 Ultra-Fast External SSD Drives: Samsung X5 vs SanDisk Extreme Pro V2

In this post I wanted to document a comparison between two of the leading fastest external SSD drives I could find on Amazon — with a price difference of nearly 2X! I wanted to see if, perhaps, the two drives were similar in performance, which would mean that I could get away...

  read ❯
Jan 2021 Yes! It's 2021, and Ruby 3.0, and Ruby on Rails 6.1 are alive and thriving. Are you?

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.

  read ❯
Sep 2020 Turbo Agile™: Optimizing Efficiency of the Engineering Process for Maximum Velocity.

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.

  read ❯
Sep 2020 How to Write Awesome CLI tools in Ruby and test them with RSpec and Aruba

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.

  read ❯
Jun 2020 Test your Understanding of Ruby Concurrency

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

  read ❯
Mar 2020 Building IntelliJ Bazel Plugin from Sources

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

  read ❯
Sep 2018 C++ Newbie Tour: Getting Started with C++ on Mac OSX

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.

  read ❯
May 2018 C5 class instance on EC2: cannot create file: Read-only file system

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.

  read ❯
Mar 2017 Dead Simple Encryption with Sym

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...

  read ❯
Feb 2017 Add a Social Activity Feed for your Site in Minutes with the simple-feed Ruby Gem

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...

  read ❯
May 2016 Building Scalable Performant And Cheap Distributed Applications Part 1

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.

  read ❯
Apr 2016 Mixmax And My First Nodejs App.

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.

  read ❯
Nov 2015 Scaling Web Applications On Postgresql A Walkthrough Presentation

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...

  read ❯
Nov 2015 Serial Console Hacks With Arduino

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.

  read ❯
Dec 2014 How To Use Arduino Nano Mini Pro With CH340G On Mac Osx Yosemite

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.

  read ❯
Nov 2014 Announcing Laser Cutter and MakeABox.IO

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...

  read ❯
Oct 2014 BORAT: Bathroom Occupancy Remote Awareness Technology with Arduino

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.

  read ❯
Aug 2014 Arduino IDE Alternatives

Review of Arduino IDE Alternatives.

  read ❯
Jul 2014 BackSeat Driver: Autonomous Vehicle Library for 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...

  read ❯
Mar 2014 Twelve Step Program For Scaling Web Applications On PostgreSQL

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...

  read ❯
Aug 2013 Detangling Business Logic in Rails Apps with PORO Events and Observers

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.

  read ❯
Feb 2013 How to configure PostgreSQL for very high read/write throughput

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.

  read ❯
Feb 2013 The Case For Vertical Sharding

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.

  read ❯
Sep 2012 The Big Switch How We Rebuilt Wanelo From Scratch And Lived To Tell About It

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.

  read ❯

/2012/09/14/

About Kig.Re©

Konstantin Gredeskoul

Konstantin Gredeskoul

Konstantin is an avid ruby expert, and a four-times CTO. He authored over forty open source Ruby gems, and is fluent in Ruby, C/C++, Go, Java and BASH. His libraries have been downloaded over 17M times and his talks have been watched by over 250K people worldwide. His interests range from using object stores and lambda functions to do high scale event collection and analytics, to scaling web applications atop of PostgreSQL.

Konstantin Gredeskoul, All rights reserved. Kig.Re™.

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