Author Archives: John

Replica Sets with MongoDB on OpenVZ

Posted on May 13, 2012 by John

I almost dumped MongoDB. I have a new instance running in Chicago that I’ve been trying to setup as a mirror of what I have running in NYC. My progress (with everything) was drastically slowed when MongoDB would crash when … Continue reading →

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Hackathon, Day 5

Posted on March 12, 2012 by John

All done with the Content Aggregator! I took a bit of time to learn best practices with threads and even have my own REST server embedded in my Groovy app. I’ve been trying to keep the memory foot print low … Continue reading →

Posted in Groovy, Hackathon, MongoDB | Comments Off

Hackathon, Day 1

Posted on March 8, 2012 by John

Done with the first day of the hackathon. The results are a bit disappointing, having only completed RSS parsers and a few models for feeds. Tonight, I’ll get onto the main aggregator engine, scheduler and start inserting the feeds into … Continue reading →

Posted in Groovy, Hackathon | 2 Comments

Hackathon starting… NOW!

Posted on March 7, 2012 by John

On Monday morning, I was reading an article on Techcrunch about information overload. That got me to thinking about my RSS reader, and my frustration with it. Sometimes I prefer reading RSS feeds on my iPhone, but I miss being … Continue reading →

Posted in Groovy, Hackathon, MongoDB, Symfony, Titanium | 3 Comments

Logging

Posted on March 4, 2012 by John

This really goes hand in hand with my last post, Monitoring. One thing I don’t get is why in production, most logging is shut off in my favorite PHP framework, Symfony. To me, logging is necessary to determine the state … Continue reading →

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Monitoring

Posted on March 4, 2012 by John

What happens to your application when you’re not watching? How many people are signing up? How many are posting? Did the latest code release slow anything down? What was going on when the server crashed?!?! These are all things that server … Continue reading →

Posted in Cacti, Lessons learned, Server Admin | Comments Off

Builds and Deployments

Posted on January 12, 2012 by John

At my previous companies, there have been two ways of putting code onto a QA or production server. FTP the files up or svn up a checkout of the production branch. But builds are so much cooler. You can have … Continue reading →

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Why Virtualization is cool

Posted on December 24, 2011 by John

When developing some application or website, I cannot stress how much it helps to use virtualization. It may seem like an overcomplication, but having an exact (or nearly exact) replica of the production environment helps immensely. For instance, when developing my … Continue reading →

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A series of lessons learned

Posted on December 24, 2011 by John

In my next posts, I’ll post a series! These are the lessons I’ve learned while at my current job. The topics will include: Why Virtualization is cool Builds and Deployments Monitoring Logging Unit testing Why CMSes suck Cool tools Documentation, … Continue reading →

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Cacti Helpful Hints

Posted on December 24, 2011 by John

When I started installing my new server, I wasn’t sure what monitoring software to use. We use Cacti at work, and I’ve used it before.. But I wanted to see what else was out there. This isn’t a review of … Continue reading →

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