Linux

Cloudflare Dev Workshop 2020 In mid-February, I had the privilege to attend the first Melbourne Cloudflare dev event. This was just one of a series of sessions they ran across the country to reach out to developers and help educate people around their thinking and the...

This is the story of an investigation that I was recently involved in at a client. It took over a week to resolve, involved networking acronyms that seemed to increase in length each day (MTU...ICMP...PMTUD?!), and wound up with us learning all about the rather scary-sounding phenomenon of black-hole connections.
A light dew settles on the leaves of the venerable elm trees which track Melbourne's, St Kilda road. The bulk of the noble Yarra River moves majestically past the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, as it does every morning unaware about what is about to take place within. Light rail service number 96, which I had boarded at the iconic Luna Park, will carry me on my sovereign journey to the DevOps Talks Conference, 2017.   Yet still, those lingering words circle around my mind, like plastic bags caught in the wind, waiting to be sucked into a stormwater drain. Self-doubt is setting in. Am I clearly delusional?

“You’re going to a DevOps conference? Aren't you a developer?”

This is something I had been asked on more than one occasion in the lead up to this conference. Each time I’m questioned, I point out that the term DevOps is exactly six characters long, and that more or less fifty percent of those characters are “Dev”. I have at least half a right to be here.
multiple-seats

My work commute

My commute to and from work on the train is on average 17 minutes. It's the usual uneventful affair, where the majority of people pass the time by surfing their mobile devices, catching a few Zs, or by reading a book. I'm one of those people who like to check in with family & friends on my phone, and see what they have been up to back home in Europe, while I've been snug as a bug in my bed. Stay with me here folks. But aside from getting up to speed with the latest events from back home, I also like to catch up on the latest tech news, and in particular what's been happening in the rapidly evolving cloud area. And this week, one news item in my AppyGeek feed immediately jumped off the screen at me. Google have launched yet another game-changing product into their cloud platform big data suite. It's called Cloud Dataproc.

lightipadWe've all been there. You are in the supermarket with two bottles of diet cola in one arm and a packet of brown rice with quinoa in the other. Your site lead calls you with a request from a client who has locked themselves out of their account. Normally you would direct them to the administration interface but, because of the paradox inducing way in which they have bent the fabric of space and time, this will require some manual intervention.  You need to apply some subtle but distinct database changes. Simply delete a row or two from the QUANTUM_PARADOX table. Well, it’s actually a view… but that’s not important right now.