A great article from Allen Pike on newly becoming a leader and considering your ability to be “on the tools”
Okay wait, you may say. That’s cool, but I like Doing the Thing. I’m pretty good at it, and if I’m leading a team, will I still get to do it? Will I still get to perform the work that got me to where I am today?
The short answer is: Yes, you can! If it’s important to you to keep doing some “individual contributor” work as a manager, you can make that happen.
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A great post by Nick Craver on how they do logging at Stack Overflow.
They log from HAProxy into SQL Server. OH. MY. GOD.
Bosun is cool. It’s easy to get metrics into, and intelligent for people to use for alerting once they’re there. Testing on existing data is fantastic.
A key feature of Bosun I really love is the ability to test an alert against history while designing it. This helps seeing when it would have triggered. It’s an awesome sanity check. Let’s be honest, monitoring isn’t perfect, it was never perfect, and it won’t ever be perfect. A lot of monitoring comes from lessons learned, because the things that go wrong often include things you never even considered going wrong…and that means you didn’t have monitoring and/or alerts on them from day 1.
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An incredible story about a doctor taking what he had and making something amazing.
Erica was at a hospital more than 100 miles (160km) away, however, so Chibanda and her mother came up with a plan by phone. As soon as Erica was released from the hospital she and her mother would come see Chibanda to reevaluate her treatment plan. A week passed, and then two more, with no word from Erica. Finally, Chibanda received a call from her mother. Erica, she told him, had killed herself three days before. “Why didn’t you come to Harare?” Chibanda asked. “We had agreed that as soon as she’s released, you will come to me!” “We didn’t have the $15 bus fare to come to Harare,” her mother replied.
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This article from Sophos’ Naked Security shows some incredible failures of opsec “because it just kept getting used.”
Unfortunately for the US and its agents, it didn’t take long to find the moles. That’s due in large part to what one former official called an “elementary system” of internet-based communications – one that was never meant to stand up to sophisticated counterintelligence efforts such as those of China or Iran, let alone one that should have been entrusted with the extremely sensitive communications between the CIA and its sources.
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A while back I built a small web app to parse one of our system configuration files because the application’s interface doesn’t have a search function (yeah, it’s that bad…). It worked OK, but over time slowed down as the XML file grew to 2.5MB and ~10k lines. The slow part was definitely BeautifulSoup’s parsing step, but it took a little poking to work out why. At this stage it was taking over 20 seconds to handle the file.
[Read More]fairly uneventful trip home
had breakfast, finished packing and grabbed a cab to the airport - berlin tegel (TXL)
airport is shitty - line up to check in, line up to get to the gate, then you’re stuck in a little cage between two gates with access to the world’s shittiest duty free shopping and a pretzel cart.
flight to london was OK
hanging around in LHR was meh. had to wait two hours to be able to drop off our bags because the QANTAS desk wasn’t open, then hung out in the QANTAS lounge thanks to RMB’s QANTAS club membership. the food was nice and the internet plentiful, the staff were lovely. I wish I’d thought about it, else I’d have had a shower just for the sake of it.
[Read More]quiet day today, I’m tired and RMB is feeling sick as a dog - even worse after yesterday’s epic foot journey
wandered down to checkpoint charlie to find a piece of the wall for mrK and do some currency exchange
grabbed the underground to Schloss Charlottenburg
10:06 AM U Kochstraße/Checkpoint Charlie 10:09 AM SubwayU6U Alt-Mariendorf (Berlin) 3 min (2 stops) 10:13 AM U Mehringdamm SubwayU7S+U Rathaus Spandau (Berlin) 18 min (13 stops) 10:31 AM
[Read More]caught the underground from Stadtmitte to Rosa-Luxemburg Platz station, walked to Luiban. it’s a cute little store, I grabbed a few things I can’t get easily at home
walked to alexanderplatz, big open place
walked to teacher’s house, curious mexican-style mural on the side. largest european work of art by area.
The mosaic frieze Our Life is Europe’s largest work of art, measured by area. Comprising approx. 800,000 individual tiles, it extends around two storeys of the Haus des Lehrers, which is located on Alexanderplatz and was designed by Hermann Henselmann. Walter Womacka designed and produced the monumental frieze, measuring seven metres in height and 125 metres in length, between 1962 and 1964 in cooperation with other artists.
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Another early transit day, another european train
IC from Gdańsk Główny to Berlin Gesundbrunnen
the station was lovely to look at from the outside - sadly it was under heavy renovation so there was plenty of construction mess around and the escalators were non-operative. being there before 0700 didn’t help either so none of the food places were open :(
fairly uneventful, we paid for first class tickets and got the same compartment style we had from prague to krakow, only with seats that were inexplicably less comfortable and there was nowhere to put a laptop :(
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