December 22, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-18

Replicating a database can make our applications faster and increase our tolerance to failures, but there are a lot of different options available and each one comes with a price tag. It’s hard to make the right choice if we do not understand how the tools we are using work, and what are the guarantees they provide (or, more importantly, do not provide), and that’s what I want to explore here.

December 13, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-11

Concept: Poison pill One strategy is a poison pill: a special message on the queue that signals the consumer of that message to end its work. To shut down the squarer, since its input messages are merely integers, we would have to choose a magic poison integer (everyone knows the square of 0 is 0 right? no one will need to ask for the square of 0…) or use null (don’t use null).

November 24, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-11-27

Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue). For many artificial intelligence researchers, it is an unexpected step toward machines that can understand the vagaries of human language — and perhaps even tackle other human skills.

November 24, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-11-24

From Monolith to Microservices tldr; baby steps (lots of them) similar infrastructure to TeleSign – on prem similar infrastructure to TeleSign? Also run on multiple clouds started with Docker on prem started with ugly hacks, as ones does ;) (not related?) practices blue/green deployment dedicated infrastructure resources service discovery, then routing, the orchestration community as a big reason on technology selection involved changes to how config and secrets are made available took much too longer to get existing tooling to work with k8s SECURITY IS HARD, e.

November 23, 2020

Go: Pointer vs Value

In A Tour of Go, it states “Go has pointers. A pointer holds the memory address of a value.” When you design your data structure in Go, you have to decide between using a pointer or not. There’s no clear rule of thumb for it. I had been reading the Go source code to AWS’s client library for DynamoDB. For a while, I had been annoying with their API design, which looks like this:

November 13, 2020

Manage AWS SSL Certificates using Terraform

When you are using an AWS Application Load Balancers to front your APIs or EC2 instances, you will need the right SSL certificate(s) on your ALB to encrypt traffic. For example, if your ALB handles traffic for apis.example.com and apis.example.org, you’ll need two SSL certificates. When you request an SSL certificate, you need to prove that you are truly the owner of the domain. In many cases, this is as simple as adding a custom CNAME entry to your DNS records to show that you have control over the domain.

November 12, 2020

Posts of the Week 11/06/20

https://rootsofprogress.org/immunization-from-inoculation-to-rna-vaccines When you get your covid shot (probably in 2021), take a moment to think back on the 300 years of progress that got us to this point. https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-python-black This is an Emacs package to make it easy to reformat Python code using black, the uncompromising Python code formatter.

October 30, 2020

Docker With Custom DNS Server

By configuring your Docker containers to talk to a custom DNS server, you gain more control over how your container look up other services – database, other microservices, etc., It turns out Docker networking isn’t completely straight forward. On Linux you can: Run a DNS server locally, either dnsmasq or devdns Run your container with --dns 172.17.0.1, the magic IP where your host machine is located Configure dnsmasq from step 1 via /etc/hosts Sadly, none of it was easy.

October 22, 2020

Posts of the Week 10/08/20

What are your favorite CLI apps? I’m looking for CLI utilities that are definitely not part of the POSIX required or optional utilities, and more coloquiallly not considered to be standard BSD or *nix fare. The Penderwicks My daughters couldn’t stop lauging during storytime. They actually enjoy bedtime now. Birdsall is an excellent writer. Just write the praser This is a whirlwind tour of writing parsers by hand.

October 20, 2020

2020 Emacs User Survey

I recently participated in 2020 Emacs User Survey. One of the questions asked is “When you were first learning Emacs, what did you find difficult to learn?” The obvious answer is keyboard shortcuts, e.g., instead of CTRL-S for save, it is CTRL-X CTRL-S. Instead, CTRL-S performs find, which is usually mapped to CTRL-F, and so on and so forth. Why Emacs is hard for new users There were other problems too.