Why do programmers code, priorities, how to assess a programmers competency and continuos integration cage fight - some food for thought... Programmers Don't Like to Code (Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch) - A very insightful article about why programmers keep re-writing code: To understand, and, after understanding, to simplify. Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities (Merlin … Continue reading Four Short Links: 30 April 2009
Month: April 2009
Why rsync is a lousy deployment tool
A couple weeks back I told you how I was preparing subversion to handle our application deployment. Well, I can happily tell you that I finally finished this earlier in the week, but things didn't go exactly as planned. You see, I finally realized rsync is the real workhorse for handling deployments in our environment … Continue reading Why rsync is a lousy deployment tool
ZFS vs LVM For Dummies
Warning: This article is an over-simplified and absolutely incomplete view of ZFS vs LVM from a user's point of view. I'm sure, LVM works great for a lot of people, but, well, for me it sucked. And ZFS simplifies my life. Honestly. Here's why. Providing Disk Space To Virtual Machines Ok, I have to admit … Continue reading ZFS vs LVM For Dummies
Data Mining Apache Logfiles
This is a guest post by Thomas Eisenbarth. Thomas studied computer science at the University of Augsburg, currently works at BINconsult GmbH, Berlin and co-founded makandra GmbH in Augsburg. He and his teams develop and operate web applications. Everybody knows those tools for analyzing logfiles written out by your favorite httpd: awstats, WebAlizer (yes, this … Continue reading Data Mining Apache Logfiles
Monitoring tools essentials: Munin vs. Nagios
When you're running any business critical application, you need to know what's going on with it. Is it up? Does it cause extended load on your servers? Does it have enough disk space left, how fast is the data on the disk growing, etc. To know all that, you need a tool which a) monitors … Continue reading Monitoring tools essentials: Munin vs. Nagios
Designing Code Structure for Server Deployment
I'm not sure when our offshore team decided to start using subversion. Was it at the start of (or during) their current project with us or have they always used it? One thing's for sure, they certainly never considered using it as a deployment tool and that's causing me one helluva headache today. The 'data/' … Continue reading Designing Code Structure for Server Deployment
The Attack Of The Affiliate Spammer
It happened on an ordinary Friday afternoon at around 6 pm. Suddenly, our traffic at autoplenum.de quadrupeled. Just like flipping a switch. Boom! There it was, tons of new users out of the clear blue sky. My first concern was for our servers and their ability to deal with that peak load. Luckily, I had … Continue reading The Attack Of The Affiliate Spammer
Test driven Apache configuration?
I know I might be going out on a limb here, but I recently got burnt pretty badly by _not_ having any test harness around my Apache configuration. We maintain a database of some 15K rewrites and I accidentally blew this away. But it gets worse - we didn't even notice for a whole week! … Continue reading Test driven Apache configuration?
Agile Essentials – Speed instead of chaos
Yesterday I gave a talk about the "why" of agile software development based on ideas and concepts of lean manufacturing. It shows some tools to speed up development by reducing waste and by working in small batches. Check it out and share it if you like it. Agile Essentialshttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=agileessentialsforslideshare-090402145018-phpapp02&rel=0&stripped_title=agile-essentials View more presentations from webops.
