Devops

One of the services I run in my homelab is the Cat of the Day (CotD). Over the past few days I’ve noticed that it hasn’t been sending out the pictures and inspirational quotes that my loyal user base (~10 people 🙄 ) have come to rely upon for their morning boost of positivity in the drudgery of corporate America. This must be corrected! With almost 4 days of downtime, I am clearly in violation of my 99.99% uptime SLA* that I’ve promised to my users. I am never going to hear the end of this… ...

Recently I was tasked with implementing Redis with Cluster Mode enabled for my company’s production application. One of the nice things about working in the modern software age is that cloud providers abstract a lot of complexity away from you. In our case, we are implementing AWS’ ElastiCache, which supports Redis Cluster Mode natively. However, it’s not so easy to replicate locally. When I set about doing this, what I thought would be a fairly standard Google search. I figured there’d be an immediately available docker-compose file supporting both Postgres and Redis Cluster Mode, but I wasn’t able to find it. As a result, my goals with this post is to create a working proof of concept that utilizes the tools I work with daily and can hopefully be of use to other developers. ...

There are a lot of important books that are recommended for software developers. A data-driven answer about which programming books get recommended online revealed a lot of the usual suspects. The top five are commonplace books that every developer should have on their shelves: The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt Clean Code by Robert C. Martin Code Complete by Steve McConnell Refactoring by Martin Fowler Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra, and Elisabeth Robson One of the books that didn’t make that list is The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Although somewhat dated in publication (originally appearing in 1988, updated in 2002 and 2013), the design insights are not. It is a refreshingly simple and elegant look into the psychology behind why design principles are critical in creation of anything that will be used by humans. After reading it recently, it got me thinking about where usability fits into the work that SREs, Platform Engineers, and other “internal tooling” type jobs are tasked with. ...