Geeking

I gave a Lightning Talk at SREcon16 and I was lucky enough to win the SRE book from Google while I was there. Here are some notes of things I was thinking while reading it. First, this is a phenomenal piece of work, that really marks a special point in time: the dawn of the possibility of wide adoption of SRE principles. I say, “possibility” because after getting exposed to the deepest details of what makes SRE work, I think that there are lots of organizations that won’t be willing or able to make it work. ...

As part of my interview prep, last night I challenged myself to do the following: Make a Kubernetes cluster (on Google Cloud Platform) …running Dockerized Zookeeper (1) and Kafka (2) …with Kafka reporting stats into Datadog Send in synthetic load from a bunch of Go programs moving messages around on Kafka Then run an experiment to kill the Kafka master and watch how the throughput/latencies change. Since thats a lot of that stuff I’ve never touched before (though I’ve read up on it, and it uses all the same general concepts I’ve worked with for 15 years) it should not be too surprising that I didn’t get it done. Yet. ...

I have an interview coming up, and so my “keep in shape hacking time” has been recently devoted to interview preparation. I thought I would make a post about what’s in my head, both as a way to solidify it (no better way to learn something than by teaching it) and in case this interview goes bad, so that my next prospective employer can see what I’m thinking about. If you, my current prospective employer are reading this, would you please not take advantage of this by removing these questions from your list? Come on guys, give me a break. If I’m going to be transparent in my thought processes, the least you can do is throw me a bone and ask at least one of these in person! ...

(This is an old post, which is missing years and years of interesting commits from my work at the DEDIS lab at EPFL and Pie Aéronefs. But it is still a good representation of what I can do for future clients and future team mates.) For a while now, it’s become clear that a useful and important piece of data about how a future colleague might work out is their open source contributions. While the conditions of open source work are often somewhat different than paid work, a person’s manner of expressing themselves (both interpersonally, on issue trackers for example and in code) is likely to tell you more about their personality than you can learn in the fake environment of an interview. ...

I’ve just been informed that my proposal for a Lightning Talk on HTTP/2 has been accepted for SREcon16 in San Jose, CA on April 7th and 8th. Come meet me!

In the old days, if you had an ISP that changed your IP address all the time but you wanted to run a server, you used dynamic DNS, i.e. a hacky script talking to a hacky API on an hacky DNS provider. These days, if you bring up a cloud server from time to time to work, it is likely to get a different IP address. But you might want a DNS record pointing at it so that it is convenient to talk to. ...

Say you are learning Swift. And like a good fanboi, the first thing you do is update to the latest and greatest because that’s like what you do when you are a nerd. But you live in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. You have bitchin’ FTTH from Unilink, but access outside of Kyrgyzstan is still limited by the great firewall that Putin has put up in Moscow or whatever. I don’t know, but it’s slow as hell. ...

Today I added this to the .htaccess files on my sites ( nella.org and blog.nella.org) in order to make them HTTPS only: Header set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" You should too!

Look what happened today: 2015/12/04 11:38:07 fetching https://nella.org 2015/12/04 11:38:08 {200 OK 200 HTTP/2.0 2 0 map[Server:[cloudflare-nginx] Date:[Fri, 04 Dec 2015 05:38:08 GMT] Content-Type:[text/html] Set-Cookie:[__cfduid=d3a3ea49ee46eb6a6803e2eb7f597e26e1449207488; expires=Sat, 03-Dec-16 05:38:08 GMT; path=/; domain=.nella.org; HttpOnly] Vary:[Accept-Encoding] Cf-Ray:[24f529d18893372c-ARN]] 0xc8203bbf60 -1 [] false map[] 0xc8200be000 0xc8206cc420} Thank you Go 1.6 and Cloudflare. You guys are bringing my website into the bright future of 2016 with no help at all from me. :)

There will, eventually, be a giant wind farm above my house. I say eventually because though Switzerland is not immune from NIMBYism, our court system deals efficiently enough with oppositions so that if something is allowed by law (zoning laws, eco-protection laws, etc) then it does go through. The opposition (and there’s always opposition) does a few court challenges, it goes up a couple layers, sometimes to the supreme court, and the court rather quickly says, “It’s legal, shut up. If you don’t like it, change the laws, don’t come begging us to do so.” ...