Year: 2015

Jetpack annual report for mamchenkov.net in 2015

This year’s Jetpack annual report for this blog is ready – have a look.  Here’s a teaser:

blog stats 2015

It’s been a busy year, so I haven’t been blogging as much as I wanted to, but overall, I think I did good (have a look at 2014 and 2013).  Just to give you a quick comparison:

Metric 2013 2014 2015
Visitors 58,000 81,000 96,000
Posts 560 628 541

I blog mostly for myself, but it’s nice to see a slight grow in traffic. Although the fact that the most popular post in this blog throughout the years – how to check Squid proxy version – is a little concerning, yet funny.  Well, at least people still find my “Vim for Perl developers” useful, even though it’s been more than 10 years since I wrote that (and probably five years since I promised to update it soon).

But as I said, I’m quite satisfied with my blogging this year.  Hopefully I can continue to do the same in 2016.

 

5 AWS mistakes you should avoid

“5 AWS mistakes you should avoid” is a rather opinionated piece on what you should and shouldn’t do with your infrastructure, especially, when using AWS.  Here’s an example:

A typical web application consists of at least:

  • load balancer
  • scalable web backend
  • database

and looks like the following figure.

typical-web-application

This pattern is very common and if yours look different you should have (strong) reasons.

It’s all good advice in there, but it comes from a very narrow perspective.  The “mistakes” are:

  • managing infrastructure manually
  • not using Auto Scaling Groups
  • not analyzing metrics in CloudWatch
  • ignoring Trusted Advisor
  • underutilizing virtual machines

darktable 2.0 released

darktable

For those people who think Gimp is the only image editor on Linux, here’s darktable 2.0.  I mentioned it briefly before, but never linked to it.  Linux Weekly News has reviewed the release candidate recently.  Have a look at the features page – it’s quite extensive.  If you are more of a visual person, there here are a few screenshots.