Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,839 posts.
Implementation of an on-call policy requires answering precisely these questions: who is responsible for on-call duties for an application/service, and how is that responsibility defined? More succinctly, who owns on-call?
I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to make it possible to push a PC’s power button remotely via MQTT by wiring up an ESP32 microcontroller, a MOSFET, a resistor, and a few jumper wires. While a commercial solution like IPMI offers many more features like remote serial, or remote image mounting, this DIY…
Road-warrior-style VPN server
Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server
technology blog about ruby, scala, java, golang, software engineering and programming in general
In this multi-part series of articles I'll try and capture everything I think someone who wants to learn and work with Kubernetes should know about. If you h...
In January 2017, we presented results to the European Commission on a FP7project called SyncFree, where we were tasked with a large-scale evaluationof the Lasp programming system. In this evaluatio...
I default to bare metal where I can. But recently I had to adopt a more complicated server management solution. And after a couple months of building for kubernetes, I must admit I'm falling for it more every day.
So, I originally planned for this to be on my premium newsletter, but decided it was better to publish on my free one so that you could all enjoy it. If you liked it, please consider subscribing to support my work. Here’s $10 off the first year of annual.
For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network…
Recently I've been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don't always work). Framework in…
Historical reference to Ian Denhardt’s Reflections On NixOS (2016-01-24), with archive and current documentation links.
A walkthrough for backing up a Linux server to an external storage provider like Amazon S3 automatically.
In distributed systems, one of the fundamental challenges is knowing whether a node or service is alive and functioning properly. Unlike monolithic applications, where everything runs in a single process, distributed systems span multiple machines, networks, and data centers. This becomes even glaring when the nodes…
The blog post will share the four phases of Real-time Data Infrastructure’s iterative journey in Netflix (2015-2021). For each phase, we will go over the evolving business motivations, the team’s unique challenges, the strategy bets, and the use case patterns we discovered along the way.
We spent a good chunk of the day investigating the now-famous bash bug (CVE-2014-6271), so I had no time to make too many jokes about it on...
End-to-end documentation of a journey from no PCB experience to fabricating my own Linux-ready system that can boot the latest mainline kernel. This article is the recommended reading for someone building their first embedded Linux board. F1C100s SoC is used for this sample board.
Microsoft is increasingly standardizing on its in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution. Is this Microsoft Linux?
CockroachDB is a newSQL database, behaving much like a traditional database while providing consistent HA and scalability out of the box.
After all, why not? Why shouldn't I put a dumb Temu weather station on the Internet?
GitHub Pages has just become even more awesome. Since yesterday1, GitHub Pages supports HTTPS for custom domains. And yes, it is still free!
Dig through the DNS and learn how and why it all works.
We encounter a lot of organizations talking about or attempting to implement SRE as part of our consulting at Real Kinetic. We’ve even discussed and debated ourselves, ad nauseam, how we can apply it at our own product company, Witful. There’s a brief, unassuming section in the SRE book tucked away towards the tail…
It’s been a while on the blog! I promise there will be more regular updates from now on, but maybe not always about tech… But why I know what you’re thinking - Kubernetes? On a home server? Who’d be that crazy? Well, a while ago I’d agree but a few things have changed my mind recently…
As a consultant, I have been called in to review and, in many cases, replace dozens of half-finished, abandoned, and sometimes forgotten data infrastructure projects.
a post from alan w. smith
