In this post we dive deep into a comparison between Terraform, Chef & Puppet, talk at length about module dependency management, see what’s a simple Terraform config, and what you need to do as you scale out your infrastrucutre.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.