jra's thoughts

Category: Geeking

  • The SRE book

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    jra
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    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…

  • A Kafkaesque Experiment

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    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…

  • Interview Questions I Hope I Get

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    jra
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    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…

  • git log ––grep “Résumé”

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    jra
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    (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…

  • I’m speaking at SREcon16

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    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!

  • Dynamic DNS circa 2016

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    jra
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    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…

  • Learning Swift, sans Xcode

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    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…

  • Strictly HTTPS!

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    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!

  • HTTP/2: Thanks Cloudflare and Go!

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    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…

  • Industrial-scale power storage and waste heat

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    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…