The operations of a company will have intrinsic risk. Risk occurs each time we decide to take an action or an inaction. This means that anything we choose to do, or not do, has associated risk.
An organization which has an unhealthy aversion to risk has a much higher chance …
When operations first became a thing, system administrators stood up servers using a base image from their favourite distribution. Things were done manually. Some administrators created their own distros, some wrote customised shell scripts to be run once-and-only-once to provision software and settings. This method worked, but it was slow …
There are three deployment management strategies that could be used to maintain a system. Each has pros and cons which I outline in this document.
- run once
A proceedure that is run once and only once to setup a system's configuration values and settings. A semaphore or flag generally blocks …
As you know from my previous post, I recently deleted LinkPeek.com and after struggling to get it back online, I vowed to start utilizing configuration management. During this exercise, I noticed that the architecture I use in production seems overly complicated.
The current production deployment stack:
- Nginx listen on …
It's about time to learn the difference.
I started researching the best ways to use salt to provision minecraft servers. I wrote a salt state formula for the vanilla minecraft server deployment. The deployment worked out great so I decided to try my luck with plugins.
In order to use plugins and mods we need to use …
During the day I am an ops sys-admin. During the night I am a husband, father of two, and a CEO of a bootstrapped start-up. After launch, my first project was to schedule regular backups of user data and archive off-site. My goal was to create backups but never need …
Pull rejection sucks!
You have just coded, implemented, and submitted a pull request. A short while later the request is declined by an upstream maintainer and you feel crushed. We have all been there. Today I'm going to show you a better way. This article will teach you how to …
I greeted the UPS man in the middle of the street to sign for my new Lenovo ThinkPad T430. Because this was My first brand-new laptop purchase I rationalized the time I spent tracking the package from the factory in China to my hands in Connecticut. Once inside …
1. Write everyday. Build a blog for the project and write about milestones, progress, and hurdles. Also keep a personal blog and write about hobbies. Read some theory about "copy writing" and search engine optimization. Write personalized email responses to customers. Great communication skills will have the most impact on …
How did you hear about us?
I first answered this question when joining Linode. I remember thinking "Wow, this is a great time to ask me!" because the real answer was still in my short term memory.
When I launched LinkPeek I applied this technique. After an amazing launch (thank …
Warning / Update!
This post was originally written from a place of jealousy and bitterness.
Turns out I was wrong about this transaction and for better-or-worse, Facebook (and Mark Zuckerburg) solidified their edge as the king of social for the last 6 years.
Original Post
Facebook purchased Instagram on Monday, April …
To utilize the no SSL option for your network, configure the DNS entry for www.google.com to be a CNAME for nosslsearch.google.com.
"I see" said the blind man, to the deaf dog, as he walked off the cliff.
As far as I can tell, I am the originator of this version of this quote.
EDIT: changed "originator of the quote" to "originator of this version of this quote".
I name my virtualenv 'virtpy'. Is there a standard name being used out there?
Maybe we can come to a consensus as a standard name? Please feel free to post your virtualenv names here as a sort of poll.
Jenn explains how she drastically decreased our grocery bill.
Today I lost a customer.
I added some new code to LinkPeek to accept coupons and I didn't think of an edge case. This ended up creating an uncaught exception in my server side code which ultimatly served the newly subscribing customer an HTTP 500 error page.
The damage was …
tldr; When faced with pivoting or killing a project, take a good look at all possible by-products. Don't miss the hidden gem in a project's slag!
Last year I built yoursitemakesmebarf.com, a novelty web application which allowed anonymous link submission. The software would automatically take screenshots of submitted links …
find out what is the ladder.
- acquire users
- support my users well
- scale in a timely manner
- react quickly to feedback
- monetize the application
But most of all I'm scared that nobody will like me. I'm scared of failure.
Now that I got …
Occupy Wall Street contributors claim to use a "stack" to determine speaking arrangements.
I plan to explain how the term "stack" used in this scenario does not align itself with the mathematical or computer science definition.
The term stack means First In Last Out or "FILO". For example: a person …
I however advocate a revolutionary search pattern like -
"russell.ballestrini.net" -site:russell.ballestrini.net
to gather an improved representation of backlinks.
Is my idea too minimal?
America has succumbed to "spectatoritis".
In loom of recent internet attacks many institutions have started scrambling in attempt to "strengthen" their security stance. I agree that auditing our systems and networks for potential flaws seems appropriate at this time to prevent getting "caught with our pants down". Incidentally, I have recently witnessed the introduction of …
except instead of exchanging matter, we programmers exchange time.
The best security acts like an onion.
Stack Overflow was a progressive and natural evolution of the standard clunky forum.
Using ajax it created a more fun and clean user experience.
Using badges and karma to gain responsibility allow forums post to become a game. People naturally like to see progression and growth, being able to watch …