Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,839 posts.
At some companies, it is expected that certain engineers will serve as part of a formal on-call rotation. On paper, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure the reliability of the product. In practice, it is a miserable burden and you probably won't even get paid for it.
Why FreeBSD instead of Linux for home servers? Exploring ZFS, jails, stability, and the reasons behind choosing FreeBSD for a home infrastructure.
Keeping my laptop clean by developing in a virtual machine
Learn how to configure K3s on bare-metal to run a Kubernetes cluster with just as much resilience and fault tolerance as a managed service.
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
When the Tarsnap EC2 instance came back online about an hour later, I found that the abrupt loss of power had resulted in filesystem corruption. As I explained in a blog post in December 2008, Tarsnap stores all user data in Amazon S3, but keeps metadata cached in EC2 . While I could not see any evidence that the…
Deploy Go apps as single static binaries with systemd. No Docker, no npm, zero-downtime via socket activation. Modern complexity is often unnecessary.
Recently, 37signals unveiled mrsk , a tool developed internally to ease with deployments of their services and an accompanying blog post which sparked a lengthy discussion on Hacker News .
You bump into DORA in the wild a lot.
Who knew figuring out the lab's occupancy would be so much work?!
The “official” Python Docker image is useful, but to actually understand why, and to use it correctly, it’s worth understanding how exactly it’s constructed.
I recently had solar panels and a battery storage system from GivEnergy installed at my house. A major selling point for me was that they have a local network API which can be used to monitor and…
RabbitMQ Crash Course for 2025
📖 You can read more of my posts on running your own Mastodon server right here: https://www.micahwalter.com/tag/mastodon/ I’ve been running my own single-user...
In November of last year, AWS announced the first ARM-based AWS instance type ( AWS Designed Processor: Graviton ). For me this was a very big deal because I’ve been talking about ARM based servers for more than a decade, believing that massive client volumes fund the R&D stream that feeds most server-side innovation…
A technical overview of Notado's migration to Fly.io
First published 2016.
What happens when we collect too much data?
I’ve written a bit about Nix and I still face moments where foundational aspects of the package system confounds and surprises me.
Adaptation, Algorithms and Ambience
Put your pocket-sized silicon to work as the world's smallest API-driven cloud - to run automation scripts, scheduled tasks, functions and to host web sites
A lot of application use systems like Kubernetes for their deployment. In my humble opinion it is often overkill as system, that offers most of the stuff such thing provide, is already present in your OS. In this article I will try to present how to utilise the most popular system supervisor from Elixir applications.
We're spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else. The only way we were able to get the pricing that low was by signing a four-year contract. That contract expires this summer, June 30, so that's our departure date for the final leg of our cloud…
A recent trend in our industry is the software architecture move from a monolith app to microservices, often with a related blog post explaining how much better everything is after. A recent blog post by neo-bank Monzo explains that they have reached the crazy amount of 1500 microservices (a ratio of ~10 microservices…
My personal website and blog
I recently went down a very deep rabbit hole to understand why, some months, Cloudflare was charging us 3x what we were expecting for their Cloudflare Images service. I’m posting this write-up because back then, a quick search didn’t turn anything up; and Cloudflare support has totally ghosted us for more than 8…
