NEW HOUSE, NEW DESK
When I moved out of my last place I decided it was time for a grown up desk. I left behind a beat down Ikea that I had used for close to a decade, I think it has more than served it’s purpose. Since I had recently gotten into woodworking, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to build something awesome. I wish I had thought to take a picture of the old desk in all it’s (lack of) glory, but alas, you’ll just have to imagine a desk that’s on the verge of collapse.
21 WAYS TO MINIMIZE EMPLOYEE RETENTION
It’s important to be able to maximize turnover and confusion while minimizing employee retention. This is by no mean an exhaustive list, but it will, without a doubt, be successful, unlike your business. Eliminate all privacy. Employees should feel like they’re being watched at all times. Ideally utilize an open floor plan, which can maximize distractions. If an open room isn’t available, cram as many people into small rooms as humanly possible.
CASSANDRA SUMMIT RECAP: DIAGNOSING PROBLEMS IN PRODUCTION
Introduction Last week at the Cassandra Summit I gave a talk with Blake Eggleston on diagnosing performance problems in production. We spoke to about 300 people for about 25 minutes followed by a healthy Q&A session. I’ve expanded on our presentation to include a few extra tools, screenshots, and more clarity on our talking points. There’s finally a lot of material available for someone looking to get started with Cassandra. There’s several introductory videos on YouTube by both me and Patrick McFadin as well as videos on time series data modeling.
SAY HELLO TO MEATBOT
What is Meatbot? Meatbot is a HipChat bot for managing status updates for our growing team of Evangelists at DataStax. It’s built in Python 2.7, utilizing the Will library. The status updates are stored in Cassandra using cqlengine. Yep, it’s up on github. There’s a few simple commands. First, you tell Meatbot about each project you work on. Once you’ve got your projects, you can list them with lsproject or delete them with rmproject.
PYTHON FOR PROGRAMMERS
When I started learning Python, there’s a few things I wish I had known about. It took a while to learn them all. This is my attempt to compile the highlights into a single post. This post is targeted towards experienced programmers just getting started with Python who want to skip the first few months of researching the Python equivalents of tools they are already used to. The sections on package management and standard tools will be helpful to beginners as well.
THE MYTH OF SCHEMA-LESS
I have grown increasingly frustrated with the world as people have become more and more convinced that “schema-less” is actually a feature to be proud of (or even exists). For over ten years I’ve worked with close to a dozen different databases in production and have not once seen “schemaless” truly manifest. What’s extremely frustrating is seeing this from vendors, who should really know better. At best, we should be using the description “provides little to no help in enforcing a schema” or “you’re on your own, good luck.
CQLENGINE NOW USING THE PYTHON NATIVE DRIVER
I’m happy to announce that cqlengine is now using the Python Native Driver. For the most part, this should be a trivial upgrade. See the notes below on upgrading. The Good News Significantly less code to maintain in cqlengine itself. We no longer need to maintain connection pools, deal with fail over, dead servers, server discovery, server removal Native driver multiplexes queries over each socket, so less sockets stay open Notifications can be sent back to the client from the server.
NO DOWNTIME DATABASE MIGRATIONS
Introduction Back at my last job, we successfully migrated from MongoDB to Cassandra without any downtime. We did two webinars with Datastax at the time (I am now a Datastax employee). Our first webinar was a general overview on the migration. The second, we covered some of the lessons we learned after being in production with Cassandra for a while. We touched on our migration process, but didn’t get deep into the details.
AN INTRODUCTION TO ROADHOUSE
Introduction In this post I will provide an introduction to Roadhouse, a python library for managing security group settings across multiple VPCs in AWS. At the conclusion, you will have an understanding of the benefits of using Roadhouse as well as be able to implement it yourself in your infrastructure. First off - what is the purpose of a VPC? A VPC provides an isolated network within Amazon, allowing you similar control as if you were managing the switches yourself.