Brian Parsons

This clip from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is a really great overview of the pros and cons of the encryption debate. Hilarious too!

Link: The Encryption Debate

Whenever I am in a building with multiple elevators, I ponder the logic and programming behind how the elevators respond to calls and if it is optimal or not. This simulator is a great way to geek out on this for real…er simulated, at least

Link: Elevator Logic

This doesn’t surprise me, I’ve often wondered why Varnish is so popular when there are better and sometimes even easier solutions out there.

Link: BBC Digital Media Distribution: How we improved throughput by 4x

[PDF] Interesting research report from IBM comparing performance of docker vs KVM. I would have liked to see Xen instead of KVM. Obviously full virtualization has more overhead than containers, but there are decent trade offs to this in terms of flexibility and security. Docker is getting to be quite flexible though, and has some benefits. I don’t know that performance will be the key criteria for picking a side (Containers vs. Virtualization)

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Dr Who references aside, there is an interesting debate forming over implementing virtualization with containers instead of hypervisors. Many application servers use the container model and while there are some benefits I don’t know that I agree about the concept of delivering more services. There is much duplication in the container model and hypervisors try to reduce that since it is essentially wasteful. Some of the problems with hypervisors, such as hoggy neighbors and “cpu stealing” are not addressed with the container approach.

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If you have browsed my HTML code you see that I have been flapping back and forth on closing void tags in HTML. I am not alone in this conceptual tug-of-war. My thought has been that it is more technically correct to do so, even though it is optional and makes for ugly code prose. This article goes through the history of the concept and where current thinking/standards lie. TL;DR version: Closing them is out of style in HTML5. Your code can be pretty _and_ correct.

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It seems no matter how careful and disciplined you are with your git workflow, you end up in a situation where you have incomplete work that you need to …uh.. “stash” somewhere because it isn’t ready to be committed. Luckily, git has a feature to handle just that. The blog link below is a great overview of the stash feature in git.

Link: Git: How to use Stash

Great slides with awesome tips from a talk given at Sunshine PHP. Implementation case studies, when to use redis and not as well as a comparison between phpredis and predis.

Link: Redis Everywhere

Really great points and techniques that anyone running a web service with a sign-up process should look at and learn from.

Link: Onboarding New Users Is Harder Than You Think

All these stats talk about possible peaks. The valleys are what you need to look at when it comes to cloud performance. It is not about how fast it can go as much as how slow it might be. 1000 IOPS is great but if it occasionally drops to 15 that’s a problem. Amazon is slower but more consistent, and that is something that you can plan around. I look forward to benchmarking these Rackspace offerings on my own to see how they compare.

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