Processes and systems make your life easier
Everything is a process, whether we document it or not.
Recent Posts
The joy of missing out
I was listening to a podcast with Jason Fried the other day and heard this term: “The Joy of Missing Out” or JOMO. It took me a couple of days to process wha...
Power of automation
Not while I have two healthy hands.
The value of a great post-mortem
I never lose, I either win or learn. Nelson Mandela
How to migrate your Redis database from one cloud provider to another
I’ve been doing a migration of our whole infrastructure from AWS to Azure recently. One of the services we use is Redis, which we use for caching purposes an...
Migrating Route53 DNS records to Azure
Recently I’ve been notified that we need to move our operations away from AWS to Azure. One of the steps I found interesting (and never did before) was migra...
The subtle art of debugging weird issues
As a senior reliability engineer I’m tasked with solving weird issues on a weekly basis. Issues you could sometimes classify as heisenbugs, at other times th...
Canary deployment with Ruby on Rails on Kubernetes
If you are reading this, chances are that you are using Ruby on Rails as your framework of choice. There have always been two main options in the past for de...
Why kubernetes?
I’ve been installing servers, deploying code to them, and exposing them to customers for most of my career. I started doing it by myself in the start. Those ...
What is a reliable system?
I plan to (let’s see how it pans out) write a series of articles on what I learned (and am still learning) during my stay at intuo. There is so much stuff I ...
Can we just get along?
I don’t know much about corporate culture in the past, but from what I saw, inter-departmental wars were business as usual. Marketing coming up with their id...
Setting up Encryption at REST with Amazon RDS and PostgreSQL
In order to make sure our customer data is as safe as possible, we decided to implement encryption at rest. Although we tried a few different approaches, we ...
Rest
When was the last time you’ve stopped and took a break? Not a weekend or 3-4 days, but a proper vacation. Something that lasts at least a week or two., a mon...
A good setup goes a long way
I’ve been limited to a 13” screen to do my work on for ages and ages, well since July 2013 at least. The only person who did the limiting was myself. One of ...
Your users are out to get you
How many times did you create a UI with a specific user flow in mind, and most of the time your users did something else? Did you ever experience users ignor...
Are you backup/restore procedures good enough?
So, my MacBook crashed yesterday. It didn’t really crash, just that it went black after logging in. Although I have a suspect, I won’t name it here because I...
Doing new things is hard, choose your hard
In my last post I touched on the topic of quitting, and how easy it is to take the easy path instead of the hard one and quit. Most of us quit all the time, ...
It’s really easy to quit
I remember when I was in my late teens, although I rode on the bicycle around a lot, I never did anything longer than a few kilometres in one go. I had an ol...
Don’t (only) focus on the code
Every developer aspires to create great things, but often the most important issue is not just the quality of your code, but many other and obscure things th...
The LinkedIn experiment
If you are an engineer you probably don’t see much use from LinkedIn as a service. It is full of recruiters, who can be very annoying from time to time. You ...