Parsing Protobuf Definitions with Tree-sitter
If you work with Protocol Buffers (protobuf), you can really save time, boredom, and headache by parsing your definitions to build tools and gene...
Articles
2024
2022
Run Your Own Kubernetes Instance with Microk8s
This post covers how to get a personal Kubernetes (K8s) cluster running on an instance with a public IP address, with HTTPS support, on the chea...
Events, Event Sourcing, and the Path Forward
Distributed systems pose all kinds of challenges. And we’ve built them in the web age, when the tech of the wider Internet is what we use in micr...
2021
Coordination-free Database Query Sharding with PostgreSQL
At Community.com, we had a problem where a bunch of workers needed to pick up and process a large amount of data from the same DB table in a high...
2020
Writing Apache Spark UDFs in Go
Apache Spark is a perfect fit for processing large amounts of data. It’s not, however, a perfect fit for our language stack at Community. We are...
Hello World on the W65C265 (65816) from macOS
I have been lucky enough to be healthy so far and have been using lockdown time to get back into electronics and microcontrollers, a hobby that i...
2019
The Kernel Change That May Be Slowing Down Your App
A kernel “bug fix” that happened at the end of last year may be killing the performance of your Kubernetes- or Mesos-hosted applications. Here’s ho...
2018
Dynamic Nginx Router… in Go!
We needed a specialized load balancer at Nitro. After some study, Mihai Todor and I built a solution that leverages Nginx, the Redis protocol, an...
2017
Cgo: When and (Usually) When Not to Use it
Cgo is really good. If you’ve worked with C libraries in other languages, I expect you already know it’s not always much fun. But Cgo is pretty eas...
Elixir: Thoughts on the with Statement
Elixir has a some great syntactic sugar. A nice feature that was introduced back in Elixir 1.2 is the with statement which allows you to string t...
2016
Sidecar: Service Discovery for all Docker Environments
Great, you have a Docker system up and running. Maybe you run stuff on your dev box in a standalone Docker instance. Maybe you are just deploying...
Building Tiny, Reliable Docker Container Images
Building good, clean Docker container images is a bit of an art, and there is a lot of conflicting advice out there about how to do them properly. ...
2015
Continue statements with Labels in Go (golang)
Flow control of nested loops can be a pain. And because Go uses for loops in great abundance, you hit this problem more often than in some other la...
2014
Writing Testable Code in Go (golang)
If you are coming from Ruby or another dynamic language you are used to mocking and stubbing extensively for testing. This works fabulously well in...
2013
MessagePack vs JSON in Ruby
MessagePack (shorthand: msgpack) gives us a big performance boost when serializing data to our data store. JSON is the reigning champ for data seri...
Cassandra vs MongoDB For Time Series Data
This is how we got a big win by switching from MongoDB to Cassandra for managing our time series data. Background MyDrive has an AWS cloud-host...
A Pattern for Wrapping C Function Calls in Rust
In my recent project, I found an idiom that seems pretty useful for instantiating new objects that wrap the functionality of an external C function...
A Week with Mozilla’s Rust
I want another systems language in my tool belt. I want a language where I can be much more productive than in C: one in which I do not fear the co...
Magritte: Running sub-processes easily from Ruby
At MyDrive we have a few hefty binaries written in C++ that are used as part of our main telematics data processing pipeline. One of these is buil...
2012
CoffeeScript Testing on Travis CI
I have recently been working on Troll-opt, a powerful but simple command line parser for Node.js that was inspired by William Morgan’s Trollop gem...
A Works-Anywhere Config For SSH Tunneling
TL;DR: This article proposes a simple solution to DNS and jump hosts that allows you to use short names on the ssh command line without impacting a...
Discovering Pending Rails Migrations With Git
At MyDrive, Gavin and I came up with what I think is a pretty novel solution to discovering new Rails migrations at deployment time. We deploy ofte...
HTTP Header Hell Starring X-Real-IP and X-Forwarded-For
TL;DR: Having both headers set to different values upsets rack-protection. It’s always fun to spend a whole day debugging something that should be...
2011
Kiwi Wikitext Parser at Wikimedia Data Summit
I will be presenting the Kiwi wikitext parser at the Wikimedia Data Summit at O'Reilly's headquarters in Sebastopol, CA on Friday. Kiwi is a for...
Convert Chef Cookbooks to Puppet Modules
What if you, for any number of reasons, needed to convert Chef cookbooks to Puppet modules and it were convenient to do it in an automated way? How...
Latest Articles
Parsing Protobuf Definitions with Tree-sitter
If you work with Protocol Buffers (protobuf), you can really save time, boredom, and headache by parsing your definitions to build tools and gene...
Run Your Own Kubernetes Instance with Microk8s
This post covers how to get a personal Kubernetes (K8s) cluster running on an instance with a public IP address, with HTTPS support, on the chea...
Events, Event Sourcing, and the Path Forward
Distributed systems pose all kinds of challenges. And we’ve built them in the web age, when the tech of the wider Internet is what we use in micr...
Coordination-free Database Query Sharding with PostgreSQL
At Community.com, we had a problem where a bunch of workers needed to pick up and process a large amount of data from the same DB table in a high...
Writing Apache Spark UDFs in Go
Apache Spark is a perfect fit for processing large amounts of data. It’s not, however, a perfect fit for our language stack at Community. We are...
Hello World on the W65C265 (65816) from macOS
I have been lucky enough to be healthy so far and have been using lockdown time to get back into electronics and microcontrollers, a hobby that i...
The Kernel Change That May Be Slowing Down Your App
A kernel “bug fix” that happened at the end of last year may be killing the performance of your Kubernetes- or Mesos-hosted applications. Here’s ho...
Dynamic Nginx Router… in Go!
We needed a specialized load balancer at Nitro. After some study, Mihai Todor and I built a solution that leverages Nginx, the Redis protocol, an...
Cgo: When and (Usually) When Not to Use it
Cgo is really good. If you’ve worked with C libraries in other languages, I expect you already know it’s not always much fun. But Cgo is pretty eas...
Elixir: Thoughts on the with Statement
Elixir has a some great syntactic sugar. A nice feature that was introduced back in Elixir 1.2 is the with statement which allows you to string t...
Sidecar: Service Discovery for all Docker Environments
Great, you have a Docker system up and running. Maybe you run stuff on your dev box in a standalone Docker instance. Maybe you are just deploying...
Building Tiny, Reliable Docker Container Images
Building good, clean Docker container images is a bit of an art, and there is a lot of conflicting advice out there about how to do them properly. ...
Continue statements with Labels in Go (golang)
Flow control of nested loops can be a pain. And because Go uses for loops in great abundance, you hit this problem more often than in some other la...
Writing Testable Code in Go (golang)
If you are coming from Ruby or another dynamic language you are used to mocking and stubbing extensively for testing. This works fabulously well in...
MessagePack vs JSON in Ruby
MessagePack (shorthand: msgpack) gives us a big performance boost when serializing data to our data store. JSON is the reigning champ for data seri...
Cassandra vs MongoDB For Time Series Data
This is how we got a big win by switching from MongoDB to Cassandra for managing our time series data. Background MyDrive has an AWS cloud-host...
A Pattern for Wrapping C Function Calls in Rust
In my recent project, I found an idiom that seems pretty useful for instantiating new objects that wrap the functionality of an external C function...
A Week with Mozilla’s Rust
I want another systems language in my tool belt. I want a language where I can be much more productive than in C: one in which I do not fear the co...
Magritte: Running sub-processes easily from Ruby
At MyDrive we have a few hefty binaries written in C++ that are used as part of our main telematics data processing pipeline. One of these is buil...
CoffeeScript Testing on Travis CI
I have recently been working on Troll-opt, a powerful but simple command line parser for Node.js that was inspired by William Morgan’s Trollop gem...
A Works-Anywhere Config For SSH Tunneling
TL;DR: This article proposes a simple solution to DNS and jump hosts that allows you to use short names on the ssh command line without impacting a...
Discovering Pending Rails Migrations With Git
At MyDrive, Gavin and I came up with what I think is a pretty novel solution to discovering new Rails migrations at deployment time. We deploy ofte...
HTTP Header Hell Starring X-Real-IP and X-Forwarded-For
TL;DR: Having both headers set to different values upsets rack-protection. It’s always fun to spend a whole day debugging something that should be...
Kiwi Wikitext Parser at Wikimedia Data Summit
I will be presenting the Kiwi wikitext parser at the Wikimedia Data Summit at O'Reilly's headquarters in Sebastopol, CA on Friday. Kiwi is a for...
Convert Chef Cookbooks to Puppet Modules
What if you, for any number of reasons, needed to convert Chef cookbooks to Puppet modules and it were convenient to do it in an automated way? How...