avleenvig

7 ms·

1.
by avleenvig 8y ago
Hi everyone! I really appreciate the feedback here. It's true, the project is 5+ years old. The industry was very different back then, we were barely starting to think about containers at scale. The cloud was a thing for sure, but the
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by avleenvig 8y ago
Thanks incomplete :)
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by avleenvig 9y ago
You should definitely make sure this - the teaching and growing of other engineers - is part of your responsibility. It's the only way to scale yourself up.
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by avleenvig 9y ago
Indeed. As your business grows (it is growing, right - that's why you hired more engineers?) you need to scale yourself. If you don't, eventually you'll become the bottleneck. Following this process has a definite cost up f
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by avleenvig 9y ago
Thanks, glad you liked it :-) There's definitely a strong bias in our industry towards "greenfield" things - everyone wants to do the fun, exciting, initial work. But once the new shiny coating has worn off there's a ton
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by avleenvig 9y ago
As long as you do explain later ;-)
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by avleenvig 9y ago
I completely agree, and in writing this post it was one of the pieces of feedback that came up. Ultimately we decided to go ahead with the verbiage because it would be the most easily understood, but the _message_ here is not about junior v
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by avleenvig 9y ago
As the author of this blog post I'd just like to say: 1. Thank you everyone for the positive tone of comments 2. Thank you for the feedback and perspectives :-)
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A crowdsourced android app to map every power socket in every airport worldwide(play.google.com)
2 points by avleenvig 14y ago|0 comments
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by avleenvig 14y ago
There are many benefits to projects like this. I would argue that this thread is the biggest benefit - people are sharing knowledge on shell scripting, and I'll bet you one hamburger that at least 5 people learn something new as a result. T
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by avleenvig 14y ago
Really, we should be using double square brackets. We're not aiming for POSIX compliance and double square solves a lot of problems.
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by avleenvig 14y ago
It depends where you draw the line. CGI's were passed many variables and an environment by the web server. In that respect, this is closer to a web server - the only thing it doesn't handle is the very lowest level network listening.
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by avleenvig 14y ago
We have basic filtering now :-)
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by avleenvig 14y ago
There are likely many MANY more :-) I suppose I should cook up a sanitising method. Fortunately, stackoverflow to the rescue! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/89609/in-a-bash-script-ho...
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by avleenvig 14y ago
It's likely I'll want to do some more complex stuff in bash, rather than pure sh. My preferred shell is zsh but of the more advanced shells, bash is the most prevalent. I've pushed the change to use /usr/bin/env bash :-)
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by avleenvig 14y ago
RO filesystems can be bad, but usually they're soft failures for us: * Memcache can still work just fine * Db servers stop responding (and the app handles that fairly gracefully) * Web servers serve files from a RAM disk, so they keep wo
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by avleenvig 14y ago
Honestly, we find it's much easier to spread the load between many switches, and have enough capacity that one switch failure is a non-event. Switches are expensive, it's true. After a certain point it does become less expensive and complex
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by avleenvig 14y ago
If I could hand-craft circuit boards and CPUs, I probably would :-)
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by avleenvig 14y ago
That sounds really good in theory, but in practice it's less good. There are a number of different types of costs to consider: 1. The cost of server hardware 2. The cost of unused hardware capacity 3. The administration cost (people, s
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by avleenvig 14y ago
Tons of stuff! Stay tuned for that in a future post :-) We posted about this in 2010: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/02/24/analyzing-etsys-data-... Probably time for a refresh! - Avleen Vig, Staff Operations Engineer, Etsy
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by avleenvig 14y ago
sudo koan --replace-self sudo reboot -f
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by avleenvig 14y ago
So, this is somewhat untrue for us. For example, let's look at some common web stack infrastructure: * Web servers * Database servers * Monitoring servers * Asynchronous task processors * Scheduled task servers (eg, cron jobs) In
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by avleenvig 14y ago
There is detail about multi-site redundancy which we're saving for a future post :-) You're right that a single switch failure would be impactful, but the impact of one switch going down would actually be very minimal. For example our web s