Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

Web Developer Roadmap

I’ve been saying for years, that there is no such thing as a “full stack developer”, no matter how many CVs your HR department processes per day, matching the title.  Web Developer Roadmap is a cool little GitHub repository, which maps the road for becoming a web developer in 2018.

It shows technologies that you need to get familiar with, depending on what kind of a web developer you want to become – front-end, back-end, or DevOps – and how to organize your learning and move from one technology to another.

The reason the “full stack developer” isn’t there, is, I’m sure, because that just combines all of the other ones.  And each one of them is way more than can fit into a single human head.  So the combination would probably make it explode.

Even if you are already an experienced web developer, this roadmap is a handy thing to keep around, as it gets updated as things change.  And in web development things do change, and they do so frequently.

7 ways to do containers on AWS

“7 ways to do containers on AWS” covers a variety of different ways to run containers on the Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure.  These include most of the usual suspects, like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), and hand-rolled vanilla containers on EC2, as well as a few lesser known ones like templated Kubernetes and Amazon Fargate.

TOP 10 MySQL 8.0 features for DBAs & OPS

Here’s a list of the TOP 10 MySQL 8.0 features for DBAs and OPS, with some detailed explanations of what they are and links to more information.  The features covered are:

  1. Temporary Tables Improvements
  2. Persistent global variables
  3. No more InnoDB System Tables
  4. Reclaim UNDO space from large transactions
  5. UTF8 performance
  6. Removing Query Cache
  7. Atomic DDLs
  8. Faster & More Complete Performance Schema (Histograms, Indexes, …) and Information Schema
  9. ROLES
  10. REDO & UNDO logs encrypted if tablespace is encrypted

A Practical Introduction to Container Terminology

“A Practical Introduction to Container Terminology” is at the same time two things for me:

  1. The longest blog post that I’ve seen in a long time, if not ever.
  2. The best introductory tutorial into containers.

Strongly recommended.

Nginx 1.13.9 and HTTP/2 Server Push

Here are some very exciting news from the Nginx front lines: HTTP/2 Server Push is now available in the latest and greatest Nginx 1.13.9, which was released yesterday!

Server Push was one of the most exciting features for me in all of the HTTP/2 specification.  But I wasn’t quite sure how it will be implemented, and, most importantly, how it can be made easily available to the web developers, who are often few levels removed from the web server configuration.  I think Nginx solves the problem quite elegantly.

On the configuration level, “location” directives are often available to the web developers withing the virtual host / server.  But for those who can’t use those or don’t want to mess around with the configuration files, an even easier option is available – Link HTTP header.

I’m sure this will soon be widely supported in all the major libraries and frameworks, much like HTTP cookies are.   Great times ahead!