While traveling in El Salvador, I found myself in the surfing city of El Tunco. Not being excellent in Spanish made it a little difficult to get around at times, but enough people spoke English that I managed to do just fine. When I did overhear English, I’d typically strike up a conversation. While walking …
By eric
It might be easy to think that, “it’s ok, we’re a small company. I can totally give this person a COO, CMO, CDO, or whatever title you are considering them for.” Unless you are completely certain of the this individual’s skill set and that they will be able to deliver, and at least initially grow …
By eric
Recently, I had the opportunity to rework a 15,000 line code base in Go. The intention was never to be a total rewrite, merely an update to a neglected app that just hummed along for years with few updates just doing what it was supposed to do. This exercise begged the question, how should I …
By eric
I’m in a situation where I need access to a few of the mesos.master’s nodes internal ports from my laptop. There isn’t really an easy way to do it since getting in typically requires the use of something like the following just to get to the master: 1dcos node ssh --master-proxy --leader After a bit …
By eric
Never underestimate the value of a great customer experience. I recently had one of those with Tipsy Elves. And it was simply around dealing with a missing package. Something that happens occasionally while living in a NYC apartment building during the busy holiday season. This might be the best customer service email I have ever …
By eric
There is a fairly large foundation of concepts in Chef that new adopters need to wrap their heads around. And even once they have done that, it doesn’t become any easier to find the right methodology to use when building your infrastructure. One of the main ideas that we have embraced at SimpleReach is pervasive …
By eric
If you’ve ever heard the saying, “the second you think it’s time for HR, it’s already too late,” then you’ll know what I’m talking about in this post. SimpleReach, having recently raised a round of funding, is now heavily in to the recruiting process on all fronts. But there is a dichotomy that comes with …
By eric
I’ve been talking a lot about message systems in distributed architectures lately. And one of the slides I show in my talks is a slide about compressing messages before writes to the database. In other words, if you have 150k messages per second coming in which would translate 1:1 in writes and force your database(s) …
By eric
It’s been a long time since I was able to run a repair on my Cassandra cluster. Basically since I went to 1.2, it just hasn’t been possible. And since repairs in Cassandra are pretty much a requirement to normal operation, this is clearly a problem. So in order to deal with the disarray that …
By eric
After being a fairly heavy user of NSQ over the past year or so and finding that it was missing a few features, I decided to jump in and try to add them myself. The only issue was that I didn’t know Go. Since something as simple as not knowing the language the application was …
By eric
