News
News about new things and personal evolution.
- dotScale 2015
CAP theorem had a strong influence in this years' edition.
Kyle Kingsbury detailed how many database products failed his
Partial tolerance test tool (P in CAP).
Salvatore Sanfilippo explained his new distributed message broker Disque.
Docker returned in the form of Kubernetes - Googles' container technology converted to the Docker-stack - and a talk from Ben Firshman (fig / compose).
John Graham-Cumming from CloudFlare and John Wilkes from Google had interesting talks about how to manage huge amount of incoming data (think 4*10^6/sec) and how to optimize the mix of production and non-production containers in the datacenter.
The other talks were quite interesting as well, check them out at the dotScale 2015 website.
- dockercon14|eu
The first European dockercon.
Big announcements like docker compose, docker swarm and
docker machine. Everything open sourced, truly independent and easily
replacement and/or upgraded with 'plugins'.
With swarm you can run your containers inside a cluster with the same
commands as in your local setup.
Compose is the adoption of the team behind Fig into the
docker fold and with it you can orchestrate multiple containers through a simple configuration
file. Since everything uses the same API, compose can orchestrate your actual cluster the same
way as your local setup.
Docker machine allows you to provision docker-compatible machines from
3rd party providers with a simple command-line tool.
These tools together allow you to orchestrate a complete cluster within a couple of minutes
with production ready code.
- Mass Git
First release of Mass Git. An open source tool written in Go to manage multiple Git repositories. You can run commands on multiple repositories, collect their output and present it in one view.
- Background information
Since founding Thriving Things I have decided to store everything in Git repositories. Not just source code.
This way I have a simple mechanism to sync everything between machines and backing up is also as simple as a push.
I started out with a simple shell script to push/pull stuff from and to my NAS. But as the number of repositories grew, the performance dropped (a bit), but mostly the output was beginning to get unreadable (long lists with repositories and their statuses). So Mass Git was born.
I chose Go because concurrency is built-in and concurrency is actually easy and cool to use. Platforms I care about are supported (Linux 386/ARM, OS X) and binaries are statically linked so no dependency issues. The language is small, has a great standard library and is full of pragmatic choices made for programmers.
- dotGo 2014
This dotGo was the first European Go conference.
It included talks from some members of the Go team and one of the best known contributors (Dave Cheney).
Lots of talks about the language itself (interface{}'s, dependency management). Some about an actual piece of
software or library, it's nice to get into the details sometimes.
The future of Go was discussed but it didn't go beyond any 1.x release. Which is fine, because if you already know
what will be broken later one, it will ruin your current experience. Of course 1.x is basically fleshed out and
most updates will "just" be about performance improvements.
- Background
Go is still a young language and at this time most Go programmers actually work for a company that requires high-performance and/or big data and that can afford to have a part of their codebase in Go.
For me the challenge will be to actually get a job for a customer that requires it, or actually convince a customer to "Go" for it. The hard part being of course that there are not many of us (Go developers) yet and transferability (of code) can be quite important for a customer.
- dotScale 2014
dotScale is all about DevOps.
The conference had a good mix of talks, from one of the founders of DNS. To the creators of Vagrant, Dokku and SaltStack, who's
software already revolutionizes the way developers and operators build their stack (and mine in particular of course).
Learning how the open model of wikipedia (seemingly perfect) operates and how foolish the US government was when it implemented Obamacare.
There were no real highlights for me, but almost every talk was worth it one way or the other.
- Personal background
In effect I'm an old-school developer with system management "add-ons", but I always disliked those "add-ons".
It's very useful to know all your systems but sometimes it gets in the way of actual development.
And I'll be honest: repairing systems on a friday or in the weekend is never a fun thing to do (thank you Murphy).
Nowadays system management is getting a hell of a lot easier and cheaper all the time.
Tools like Vagrant, Packer and Docker make it even fun again.
- Foundation
Thriving Things founded.