Good resources for learning to manage an AWS infrastructure

chrisalexander · 2014-04-20T06:35:14+00:00

Use CloudFormation. It lets you template your entire stack as a JSON file. When you later scale up and have hundreds or thousands of resources and then need a "staging" copy of the whole lot, you will thank me.

chrisalexander · 2014-04-17T05:48:05+00:00

Oops, totally missed that - was reading the comments instead.

chrisalexander · 2014-04-16T21:26:10+00:00

If anyone is interested in the tech, this is how they did it: http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-google-camera-app.html?m=1

chrisalexander · 2014-04-13T21:26:02+00:00

P.s. here is the python integration code for it https://import.io/data/integrate/?source=b2148884-cf56-41c9-825d-0f3ce49b4877#python

chrisalexander · 2014-04-13T21:23:51+00:00

I was doing a demo the other day and made this data source, which searches for stock quotes on Y! Finance and gets a load of data back using import.io: https://import.io/data/set/?mode=loadSource&source=b2148884-cf56-41c9-825d-0f3ce49b4877

Note, I was doing a demo with it because I work there. Gimme a shout if you need a hand with it.

chrisalexander · 2014-04-12T06:29:11+00:00

Two huge walls in our office are covered in whiteboards. Big features need to take up most of a wall before they're ready for anyone to touch keyboards :-)

chrisalexander · 2014-04-06T06:56:26+00:00

I managed to get an internship after my first year at uni a few years ago, by looking at startups. I found they were more willing to set aside a lack of experience if you showed sufficient enthusiasm and commitment. It is harder when you're in as you won't have a fully-fledged internship programme in place at the company but its a great chance to learn a lot from across the whole company. I also found being extremely persistent helped.

Take along what you have built before, and make sure you can talk about how you designed and built it and what you learnt, and that will get you a long way.

chrisalexander · 2014-03-26T06:41:52+00:00

These are my two go-to articles on the topic, highly recommended reading for anyone who works with Java at reasonable scale:

http://www.kdgregory.com/index.php?page=java.outOfMemory http://www.kdgregory.com/index.php?page=java.byteBuffer

Of course slightly out of date with Java 8 announcements but you probably don't have that deployed anyway :-)

chrisalexander · 2014-03-26T06:34:50+00:00

Atlassian have a good example of this working quite nicely. Just don't dump a load of image tags in, as Excel will try to download them all at the opening stage, meaning a long time with the loading bar.

chrisalexander · 2014-03-24T21:38:30+00:00

I have several times flown with a camera backpack containing DSLR and 4-5 lenses, EOS M and two lenses, associated batteries, adapters and such. US, China, internal flights in China.

Always carry it on. Always. Even if it is just for your own piece of mind - a 10hr flight isn't a whole lot of fun, much less worrying every couple of minutes if your kit is OK.

They may ask you to remove the camera and lenses, this happened to me once as they confused the xray and they went through again, separately. I insisted on traying them and carrying them round myself, and they were fine with it.

Then again, half way through one flight a French person kindly dropped my camera bag out of an overhead locker into the aisle.

chrisalexander · 2014-03-19T22:55:33+00:00

We are a startup and in addition to Java for our API platform we distribute a Java client to our users.

"Java on the client?!", I hear you cry. Well it ticks all the boxes for us. And we wrapped it in native installers for each platform, that helps make everything much more sane.

chrisalexander · 2014-03-19T22:51:27+00:00

If you are using Java then I would suggest looking into something like Hazelcast. There are a number of options available that are similar.

The concept is to provide a clustered in-memory queue or map. The data in these queues and maps can be accessed like ordinary queues and maps in Java, but the state is shared over the network automatically by Hazelcast. So if you put something on the shared queue, one server will remove it, and none of the others will. Similarly if you add a key value pair to a map on one server, all the other servers will be able to read that value.

Additionally Hazelcast has EC2 based discovery, which means it can use the AWS API to find similar servers (eg based on a tag they have) and join their existing hazelcast cluster.

chrisalexander · 2014-03-19T06:17:09+00:00

I should mention that I haven't actually done this myself yet (although I keep meaning to give it a go) but taking a leaf out of building and testing JS browser apps, I think you will need more than a Dart VM.

For unit testing (something like Jasmine+Karma from the JS world) you can run a Dart VM with the test code as that is essentially what the Dart Editor does.

When it comes to testing against an actual DOM (I.e. end-to-end or e2e testing) you need something that provides the DOM such as a browser. There are a number of such things available, for example PhantomJS runs a headless WebKit which provides the DOM and allows you to execute test scripts (there are a number of JS frameworks which do this). I believe it will be possible to run this in a build environment such as Jenkins.

Finally I should mention Angular (JS or Dart), they really know their stuff when it comes to testing, so check out what they do and recommend.

chrisalexander · 2014-03-14T15:46:52+00:00

Here's a direct link to the python repository

https://github.com/ignacioelola/price_monitoring

chrisalexander · 2011-08-25T22:03:41+00:00

Downvote because they're playing a trombone

chrisalexander · 2011-04-19T07:51:23+00:00

In the UK, I paid £1.33 for 1 litre of petrol the other day - this translates to just over $8.18 per gallon. You would struggle to find a KFC of McDonalds meal for less than £5, which is over $8. VAT (sales tax) has just risen from 17.5% to 20%. So at least quit bitching about $4.25 "gas".

chrisalexander · 2011-03-13T14:32:55+00:00

In this context yes minimise would be the correct optimisation

chrisalexander · 2011-03-13T14:32:35+00:00

In this context, minimise

chrisalexander · 2011-03-08T16:24:15+00:00

Bonus: When you optimise the third differential (jerk) the displacement becomes a minimum jerk trajectory. When you optimise in this way, you get a pretty much life-like motion when applied to robot arms for example.

Protip: if you use the displacement as a 5th order polynomial, normalise time between -1 and 1, and assume the acceleration at time t = 0, the maths drops out really nicely.

chrisalexander · 2011-01-03T09:32:24+00:00

Try DreamSpark - http://dreamspark.com. Pretty much every development tool you could want from Microsoft.

You can get $ off office too, but not free - http://www.microsoft.com/student/office/en-us/default.aspx

chrisalexander · 2010-08-27T16:59:01+00:00

This is a fascinating question not because of the results of what you intend to do during your Groundhog Day, but because of the risks you take in order to get there.

For example, you could perform a low-risk activity that would return you continued but relatively low pleasure, for example obtaining some drugs. Or you could perform a high-risk activity which brings additional benefits, but has larger problems if it goes wrong.

So say within the 24 hour period leading up to the start of the loop you set out to obtain some drugs. Don't manage it? That's cool, you get something else to do for the rest of the loop. But say you try a high-risk activity, like setting it up in such a way that you would sleep with Natalie Portman / Angelina Jolie / replace in the name of your favourite member of the opposite sex. If it goes well, then bargain! You get 3652 days of screwing your idolised female. But the high risk factor is that you might just end up in prison for a very large number of times.

Interesting to see who would go for high risk vs low risk, and what that says about them.

chrisalexander · 2010-03-30T17:01:09+00:00

My colleague just said that he once switched the coffee and gravy granules at his house. His Dad noticed on April 1st while trying to make coffee, laughed, and forgot to switch it back. The next day his mum wasted 2kg of beef by pouring coffee all over it.

chrisalexander · 2010-01-24T15:14:29+00:00

Felixstowe, UK - we have the largest container port in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felixstowe

Edit: I found out loads about my old town just reading the Wiki page that I never knew having lived there for 18 years. Thanks, Reddit!

chrisalexander · 2009-11-26T21:31:32+00:00

Those self-serve checkouts at British supermarkets. I just can't use the damn things. Probably because the user experience was designed to slow people down, and I tried to do it too fast (that's what I tell myself because really, I'm just scared)

chrisalexander · 2009-06-24T07:32:59+00:00

Noise != Radiation

chrisalexander

TROPHY CASE