When are we going to deploy on Fridays?

I've been asked about Friday deploys so often I thought it might be good to write this to explain why I will consistently resist the suggestion that they become a matter of policy.

About those backups

To: The System Administrator

Fail fast

More than a few times, and especially after starting a new job at a young company, I've experienced reluctance at deploying during peak traffic, and in particular, during a traffic spike.

Not too long ago this happened during the launch of a site redesign. I used to think it was…

Operations Engineer

Medium is seeking an experienced Operations Engineer to help us run Medium and…

The first solution isn't always best

I was digging through some logs just trying to get used to reading them. We were logging latency metrics per-minute and so hadn't noticed the issue, but for some reason on this occasion I bucketed latencies from a sample per-second. It was easy to notice that…

You can’t avoid surprises but you can prepare for them

Knowledge is Freedom

Knowledge is freedom. So let me help with that by saying that none of the data you put into “the cloud” is private. Just get used to that idea.

I used to work for a “cloud” service and part of my job required seeing private data. It was mostly banal junk and I…

The Iranian riots of 2009

Twitter was on managed hosting in 2009 and had entered a spike in user-ship that began with the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections. Our service provider had a hard time dealing with the pressure on their network infrastructure from the traffic. Their network was heavily segmented for…