What is a design document? When is it useful to have one? How to make it useful? These are the questions I’m going to address in this post. The goal is to provide some bite sized, easy to remember guidelines. My promise to you is that after this post, you’ll be faster and more effective in making and reviewing designs. This is a written version of a talk I gave at my current employer....
Running a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization correctly is difficult and expensive. Spare the frustration, perhaps what you need is Sysadmins. Since the term was coined by Ben Treynor in 2003 at Google, lots of ink was spent on praising SRE practices. Not enough on when it is appropriate to have SREs. This post is a take on that angle. Disclaimer: I was an SRE at Google and this piece represents only my own views....
This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the process? Not so sure. This is the story of me trying to be unconventional at probably the most studied game in existence and using my software engineering background for something that probably doesn’t need it....
Over the last year, at work I had multiple chances to debug how containers work. Recently we had to solve some networking problems a customer had with Kubernetes, and I decided I wanted to know more. Once the problem was solved, I spent more time on investigating what is actually going on under the hood. After seeing the wonderful Eric Chiang and Laurent Bernaille talks, and reading through the very informative posts by Lizzie Dixon and Julia Evans (that I really really recommend), I got enough information about how a container is created and managed....
Introduction In February 2014 I had a very unpleasant surprise after coming back home from a weekend in Berlin. Me and my girlfriend found out our apartment upside down because of burglars. We suffered the loss not only of many of our belongings, but worse, of our safety. We didn’t feel safe in our home and we didn’t feel safe to leave it - not even for half an hour - for the fear to come back and find somebody inside....