Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Linux and open source have won

I knew this would happen for a long time.  I knew it happened.  But even if that’s nothing new, it’s still nice to hear – “Linux and open source have won, get over it“:

In 2015, Microsoft embraced Linux, Apple open-sourced its newest, hottest programming language, and the cloud couldn’t run without Linux and open-source software. So, why can’t people accept that Linux and open source have won the software wars?

This is a huge and import change in technology, which has major affect on the rest of the world.  It’s nice to know that I’ve played a small part in that.

Netflix now available worldwide, Cyprus too

These are super exciting news – Netflix now available worldwide, Cyprus too!  For those who don’t know this service, Netflix is basically the Google of the TV series and movies.  Until recently it was only available in US, UK, and very few other locations, but now they’ve expanded to 130 countries more.

netflix pricing cy

For 8 EUR a month you get an unlimited access to all their movies and TV shows.  You can stream content to your TV, laptop, tablet, or phone, and for a couple of extra euros you can even watch stuff on more than one screen simultaneously!

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

Files Are Hard

fs_properties

“Files Are Hard” is one of those articles that show how complex even the simplest of things are.  How complex is writing to a file?  Well, quite.  Especially if you want to make sure there’s no corruption in case of a crash.  It goes both over the theory and practice, looking at different file systems.