Viewing profile — avleenvig

Hi everyone! I really appreciate the feedback here. It's true, the project is 5+ years old. The industry was very different back then, we were barely starting to think about contai…

Thanks incomplete :)

You should definitely make sure this - the teaching and growing of other engineers - is part of your responsibility. It's the only way to scale yourself up.

Indeed. As your business grows (it is growing, right - that's why you hired more engineers?) you need to scale yourself. If you don't, eventually you'll become the bottleneck. Foll…

Thanks, glad you liked it :-) There's definitely a strong bias in our industry towards "greenfield" things - everyone wants to do the fun, exciting, initial work. But once the new …

As long as you do explain later ;-)

I completely agree, and in writing this post it was one of the pieces of feedback that came up. Ultimately we decided to go ahead with the verbiage because it would be the most eas…

As the author of this blog post I'd just like to say: 1. Thank you everyone for the positive tone of comments 2. Thank you for the feedback and perspectives :-)

There are many benefits to projects like this. I would argue that this thread is the biggest benefit - people are sharing knowledge on shell scripting, and I'll bet you one hamburg…

Really, we should be using double square brackets. We're not aiming for POSIX compliance and double square solves a lot of problems.

It depends where you draw the line. CGI's were passed many variables and an environment by the web server. In that respect, this is closer to a web server - the only thing it doesn…

We have basic filtering now :-)

There are likely many MANY more :-) I suppose I should cook up a sanitising method. Fortunately, stackoverflow to the rescue! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/89609/in-a-bash-scr…

It's likely I'll want to do some more complex stuff in bash, rather than pure sh. My preferred shell is zsh but of the more advanced shells, bash is the most prevalent. I've pushed…

RO filesystems can be bad, but usually they're soft failures for us: * Memcache can still work just fine * Db servers stop responding (and the app handles that fairly gracefully) *…

Honestly, we find it's much easier to spread the load between many switches, and have enough capacity that one switch failure is a non-event. Switches are expensive, it's true. Aft…

If I could hand-craft circuit boards and CPUs, I probably would :-)

That sounds really good in theory, but in practice it's less good. There are a number of different types of costs to consider: 1. The cost of server hardware 2. The cost of unused …

Tons of stuff! Stay tuned for that in a future post :-) We posted about this in 2010: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/02/24/analyzing-etsys-data-... Probably time for a refresh! -…

sudo koan --replace-self sudo reboot -f

So, this is somewhat untrue for us. For example, let's look at some common web stack infrastructure: * Web servers * Database servers * Monitoring servers * Asynchronous task proce…

There is detail about multi-site redundancy which we're saving for a future post :-) You're right that a single switch failure would be impactful, but the impact of one switch goin…