cothomps's comments

cothomps | 7 years ago | on: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

I was curious whether or not the Sride project was failing. We were about to do a migration once some key integration things were done; doesn't look like they'll finish those.

cothomps | 9 years ago | on: Amazon Elastic File System – Production-Ready in Three Regions

Or scenarios where you can use EFS to stage data 'for something else' (i.e. shared image / upload content that stages to a CDN, etc.)

Keep in mind (and this comes from hard experience in 'traditional' NFS web server architecture) - if you mount everything on an NFS volume, you ensure that

1) If something goes wrong on that NFS mount, everything goes wrong. (bad code deploy? All nodes are down!)

2) If you rely on an NFS mount to store everything (e.g. trust keystores for JVMs,etc.) your entire infrastructure is dependent on the I/O capabilities of that NFS mount.

3) No matter how clever you are (or how much you trust NFS clients/versions) you will deal with file locking if you are doing a fair amount of read/write from multiple nodes to a single NFS mount.

Short story - EFS will make some of the 'hard' things with distributed nodes possible, but don't make the easy things impossible to troubleshoot.

cothomps | 9 years ago | on: AWS is inappropriate for small teams because its complexity demands a specialist

.... kind of. A reservation is all about planning capacity. If you know (e.g.) that you need two web servers "hot" all the time to serve a base level of traffic, you can pay for that up front either partially or in total (a reservation) at some pretty significant savings. You can add hourly (or spot) capacity as needed - but paying for what you'll be using up front can make AWS very economical.

If you're paying for X1 servers for an extended period of time on an hourly basis, you should be entitled to a thank you note from Jeff Bezos.

cothomps | 9 years ago | on: The Art of Monitoring

To the "free chapter" idea - I think the website has a pretty good prospectus, and compared to other tech books / publishers, it's certainly well worth taking a flyer on it for a maximum of $20.

cothomps | 11 years ago | on: In Defence of WordPress

Nice!

As much as Wordpress gets bad pub, there is certainly the open ways in which security is handled and patches are distributed. Far better in most ways to commercial CMS (and even some open source) where systems seem to run unpatched until a system upgrade or a security incident.

cothomps | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?

It seems that by the time a career path / financial instrument is widely talked about as a "lifestyle", it's time to get out.

1999: "The dot-com lifestyle", everyone is an HTML/Flash developer. 2005: Flipping houses, adjustable mortgages - Mini Donald Trumps abound.

2015 seems to be lining up to be an energy industry crash.

cothomps | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?

1) I was fortunate enough to be in a good place where my wages were not hit terribly hard, but there was a big slowdown in wage growth.

2) I did take a pretty dull "and stressful for being that dull" job with an insurance co. as a senior developer after the startup (probably closer to 'small biz' at that point) I worked for had a major restructuring. The dull job did allow me to focus a bit more on some other freelance/networking opportunities.

3) As a few have noted, the biggest thing afterwards seemed to be the outsourcing wave. That plus the sudden glut in the market seemed to nearly wipe out entry level opportunities. There was a period of time where I (being only 6-7 years out of college myself) don't recall working with a single new graduate.

cothomps | 12 years ago | on: GitHub monoculture

It helps that ad-driven SourceForge seems to be doing its best to shove people off the platform.

cothomps | 12 years ago | on: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

... this is right on. I've seen my own role in "DevOps" as being one that is less task-oriented and more toward bridging skill sets. The drive toward specialization (mentioned by the author) is leading us toward having "Ops" administrators that are completely incapable of understanding how an object-oriented system is constructed and "Devs" who seem almost oblivious to how computers (web servers, middleware containers, databases, etc.) actually work.

cothomps | 12 years ago | on: How to Minimize Politics in Your Company (2010)

Completely agree on your #2 - even in cases where management sincerely believes that they are "open and honest", if you haven't established trust at all levels the rumor mills will fire up as soon as closed door meetings happen.

Even worse (and I've seen this probably too many times): at various meetings talk about openness, transparency, etc. - then a day or two later announce a reorg, let a few people go and send vague boilerplate e-mail to all hands.

I'm always amazed at various managers/leaders that are totally oblivious to the fact that they are developing their own reputations primarily through their actions and the opinions of "ex" employees. If you're a shop in town with more 'ex' employees in the general workforce than actual employees, smart people will figure it out.

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