Month: May 2017

Building the Right Alerting System

Here’s something I wanted to get into for a while now, but haven’t had the time yet – switching the monitoring / alerting system from server-oriented to business-oriented.  The gist of the story is:

If it’s not actionable and business critical, then it shouldn’t ring.

The article has some statistics and summaries as well.  The reasoning behind the switch is obvious, but it’s good to have it formulated:

After a few months, I can tell reducing our alerting rate should have been a top priority before things got out of hands, for a few reasons.

  • Constant alerts prevented the team to focus on what was important. Being interrupted even for things that can wait for a few hours lowers our productivity when we work on things that can’t wait.
  • Being awaken every night, several times a night exhausts a team and make people less productive at day, and more prone to do errors.
  • Too many off hours interventions cost the company a lot of money that could be invested in hardening the infrastructure or hiring someone else instead.

Is group chat making you sweat?

Jason Fried has an excellent write-up on the pros and cons of using group chat for the team communications, and some of the ways to make it better. We use HipChat in the company and while it’s vital to our operations and I can’t even begin to think how we could do what we do without it, it does have some negative side effects – exactly as James describes them.

The most valuable advice out of that long article is this one (I’ve heard it before a few times, but it’s worth repeating):

Think about it like sleep. If someone was interrupted every 15 minutes while they were trying to sleep, you wouldn’t think they’d be getting a good night’s sleep. So how can getting interrupted all day long lead to a good day’s work?

 

Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim

OK, this one is socially funny and statistically cool – Stack Overflow question on how to exit Vim editor was viewed over a million times in the last few years.  Now, there’s a breakdown of all sorts of statistics about who gets stuck in Vim the most.  It’s pretty amazing the kind of questions and answers one can ponder at when having access to a lot of statistical data.

:wq

PHP : Moving from array to class

“Moving from array to class” is yet another thought-provoking take on the difference between arrays and classes in the modern versions of PHP.  The benefits of moving from arrays to classes seem to be not only in the code readability and maintainability, but quite clearly in performance and resource utilization (CPU and memory in particular).

Using the Strict-Transport-Security header

Julia Evans has an excellent write-up on “Using the Strict-Transport-Security header” – what it is, why you’d want to use it, and what are some of the consequences of using one.

As always with her blog posts, this one is very focused on one particular subject, easy to read, and explains things simply, so that the reader’s technical level is always irrelevant (OK, OK, you do need a basic understanding of how HTTP works, but not more than that).