My watch is buzzing and in my pre-dawn stupor I cannot decipher if this is an alarm or a phone call. The time is 4:45 AM. I pull it together to realize it’s a call from a number I do not know - never a good sign. I answer and it is a coworker - my peer who runs our support team that is engaged in nearly all production issues for our customers. “Hi Ryan. Sorry to wake you, I know it’s early. Our biggest customer is reporting their requests are taking over two hours to return results. We think it’s because of our messaging system but we aren’t sure where to go from here. We need your help. Please join our call.” A few moments later my watch buzzed again as my morning alarm sounded. Today, this morning will not be for a workout.

Hofstadter Documentation

How going blindly into microservices can introduce too much complexity and lead to disaster.

Git Story is a tool that enables developers to create .mp4 video animations of their Git repository commit history, branches, and tags.

API Gateways in general, and Apache APISIX in particular, provide a single entry point into one’s information system. This architecture allows for managing load balancing and failover over similar nodes. For example, here’s how you can create a route balanced over two nodes in Apache APISIX: curl http://localhost:9080/apisix/admin/routes/1 -H 'X-API-KEY: edd1c9f034335f136f87ad84b625c8f1' -X PUT -i -d '{ 'uri': '/*', 'upstream': { 'type': 'roundrobin', 'nodes': { '

Steve Springett is a conscientious senior security architect. And in 2018, he published an essay on GitHub arguing that from a security engineer's perspective, WebAssembly "increases the attack surface of any browser that supports it." Springett wrote that WebAssembly modules are sent in (unsigne...

Researchers have found a way to use the web's basic functions to identify who visits a site—without the user detecting the hack.

Processors come, roughly, in two large families x64 processors from Intel and AMD, and ARM processors from Apple, Samsung, and many other vendors. For a long time, ARM processors occupied mostly the market of embedded processors (the computer running your fridge at home) with the ‘big processors’ being almost exclusively the domain of x64 processors. … Continue reading Filtering numbers faster with SVE on Graviton 3 processors

Automation and orchestration solutions are maturing and moving beyond initial implementations to large-scale, business-as-usual technologies.

Larry Maccherone shares how Comcast fixed then reduced vulnerabilities by taking a developer-first approach to security.

Issues can be addressed with proper planning, an understanding of your application and its data needs, and proper caching strategy.

Through 5G networks and edge computing, enterprises can develop end-to-end value chains that perform as a cohesive, self-improving services.

Also: Visual Studio cozies up with git, c++; the SRE behind JWST; and the Cloud ARM64 race. Plus more!

We got a call from a customer, a pretty serious one. RavenDB is used to compute billing charges for customers. The problem was that in one of their instances...

Cato Networks SD-WAN

As part of my new job, I’m learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query al…

SREs face multiple challenges while their platform becomes available in different locations on the globe. One step in overcoming them is building a solid monitoring system to enable that.

The BPF subsystem allows programmers to write programs that can run safely in kernel space. All memory accesses and function calls in BPF programs are statically checked for safety using the in-kernel verifier, which analyzes programs in their entirety before allowing them to be loaded. While this allows the kernel to safely run BPF programs, it heavily restricts what those programs are able to do. Among these constraints is a rule that programs cannot store pointers into BPF maps for use (such as dereferencing them or passing them to the kernel in kfunc and BPF helper invocations) at a later time. A patch set by Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi adds this capability to BPF.

When it comes to issues like supply-chain traceability, companies like ADM are pioneering a holistic approach to business practices.

Over the last five decades or so, free and open-source software (FOSS) has gone from an almost unknown quantity available to only the most technically savvy to underpinning much of the infrastructure we rely on today. Much like software itself, FOSS is "eating the world". But that has changed—is changing—the role of the maintainers of all of that code; when "critical" infrastructure uses code from a FOSS project, suddenly, and perhaps without warning, that code itself becomes critical. But many maintainers of that software are volunteers who did not set out to become beholden to the needs of large companies and organizations when they released their code, they were just scratching their itch—now lots of others are clamoring for theirs to be scratched as well.

Event-Driven by Oskar Dudycz

Intentional design is the most productive kind. It begins with “who’s it for?” and “what’s it for?” as foundational questions. Along the way, complicated systems…

I was recently asked to respond in writing to the prompt

Are you a project manager or a team lead of a web product, and your team is considering adding something to your frontend tech stack? And…

An opionated take on how to build HTTP APIs that are easy to understand as a consumer