Incident Management Metrics and Key Performance Indicators
In 2008, I got my first job at a software-as-a-service company. We built learning management software and ran it on servers in the small data center connec...
Recent posts
Deployment Strategies
There are many ways to deploy applications to a production server environment, and the terminology around deploy strategies is often confusing. In this shor...
Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders
Here is a somewhat fictionalized personal story. I’ve changed the names of the people and the technology used.
Using Autotools to Configure, Make, and Install a Program
Autotools is one of the most widely adopted code packaging and shipping tools available to developers on Linux. While there are alternatives, such as CMake,...
Creating and hosting your own deb packages and apt repo
As an Ubuntu user, I find myself typing apt install … frequently as a way to install software on my system. But what if I wanted to distribute my code to o...
Achieving Repeatability in Continuous Integration
In software engineering, continuous integration is the practice of merging all developers’ working copies to a shared mainline several times a day. Grady B...
Why is JRuby Slow?
Recently, I made some contributions to the continuous integration process for Jekyll. Jekyll is a static site generator created by GitHub and written in Rub...
Protocol Buffers Best Practices for Backward and Forward Compatibility
Protocol Buffers serialize structured data so it can be efficiently stored or shared over a network. They were designed for internal use at Google in 2001 a...
Understanding Docker Multistage Builds
At first glance, writing Dockerfiles appears to be a straightforward process. After all, most basic examples reflect the same set of steps. However, not all...
Getting a Repeatable Build, Every Time
I wanted to sit down and write about all the tricks we learned and that we used every day to help make builds more manageable in the absence of Earthly. It’s...
What Is Continuous Integration?
Continuous integration has become prevalent in software development, but it’s still a complex and wide-ranging topic. In this post, we’ll cover the basics o...
DOS Gaming In Docker
Distributing shareware from the 90’s in modern Docker images.
Building a Monorepo with Bazel
A monorepo is perhaps what you would expect from the name: a single code repository for your entire codebase.
Understanding Docker Networking
Docker is the de facto model for building and running containers at scale in most enterprise organizations today. At a very high level, Docker is a combinat...