This repeated MacOS upgrade fail annoyed me. I saw stuff on the internet about Apple’s servers being overwhelmed. That wasn’t it. It turns out I only had 4G of free disk space left.
I’m never getting only 128G of SSD again. Deleting 8G of Spotify cache, and it worked smoothly, if slowly.
Simples!
Edit: had a major fail going to 12.4. The system locked, unbootably so. I took it to the Apple store and the very nice man poked it with some electrons and the update completed.
Coming out of a job where I was working on a 20-year old Perl codebase, I’ve got some burns to get off my chest. I’m reading “Accelerate” by Forsgren, Humble and Kim which claims to have scientific backing for what makes for efficient development in a team. In my recent experience:
Use decent version control. To me, that means GitHub. Use a branching strategy to code each branch to a JIRA. Make the branches short-lived, preferably a day. GitHub is stateless. Diffs are resolved at merge-time when pull requests are made. Under NO circumstances use something like Perforce. That is like putting a large speed bump under a low slung car. It’s stateful. Mapping a repo into your filesystem is a pain. Rewinding commits is a royal pain. Ugh.
Release often, releases should be easy. A marker of a high performing team is how frequently they release software. A release should not be confined to one person on the team and take half a day.
Great balls of mud are hopeless. We’ve been writing new software as microservices for a while now, and more recently bundling them up in Docker containers (and if you’re really advanced then using Kubernetes). In the Perl world that means using a framework such as Mojolicious, Catalyst or Dancer with excellent modules like the Template Toolkit for the view and DBIx::Class for the model and not v1 of view software that’s barely been touched for years and v2 exists. It also highly bound to Apache and hard to use elsewhere.
Ongoing support for mod_perl in Apache 2.x is ongoing. It’s already been abandoned in Apache 1.x so I would note that software is doomed at some point.
Be very careful layering software upon software. Or using features that make things opaque. Oh, and having magic variables and not documenting them. For example, you have Puppet. That’s great. Why not layer Heira on top and render most of the puppet documentation useless. Or use a templating system that magically calls in a hierarchy of other templates. Oh, and where does that database handle come from? Somewhere in the bowels of that page startup. Not sure which module.
In summary, I’d say be aware of the speedbumps. How can you improve them?
Macksville resident Melanie Williams was also shocked by a swarm of spiders climbing the outer wall of her home as they fled for higher ground. “I occasionally see spiders around the place but never anything like that, it was just insane,” she told the ABC.
The spiders outside her home were “horrific” but her neighbour told her there were twice as many inside his garage, she told Guardian Australia.
I’d found out about the Newport wetlands and after a kerfuffle on Reddit, found there was a Cardiff Wetlands down in the bay. We went and had a mosey. That was disappointing. It’s a patch of land inside the barrage, probably left over from a dock back in the day. Despite the enthusiasm of the signposts, the wildlife was disappointingly vanilla: ducks, swans, tits, crows, magpies and so on. The air was reassuringly noisy, but if there were exotic birds, they were shy. It’s worth a little walk. Once. Enjoy some pictures.
Totally unfamiliar territory for me. I have a Maven install unpacked. How to get Jenkins to see it? Answer: go to Global Tool Configuration, and set your Maven installation to *not* install automatically, then set MVN_HOME to where your install is. Simple!
The day after the vote when the result was revealed, my reaction was incandescent and aghast. How could 52% of the people who voted be so daft? Turns out it’s a common delusion. My acceptance speech as leader of an independent political party:
“My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,
We are now in the privileged position of having got rid of the Tories and their austerity agenda and are now in a position to move this country forward again. BTW, The word Tory derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe; modern Irish tóraí; modern Scottish Gaelic Tòraidh: outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”.
David Cameron’s ill-advised referendum to save the Tory party disenfranchised 48% of the population, and in the subsequent years and we have since been fed a steady stream of lies by leaver politicians and press.
Unlike the squirrels in leavers heads, I treasure the pillars of being in the EU. I like having free trade with 27 other countries. I like that the Good Friday agreement, which ended what was, in other words, a civil war, is enshrined in an open border. Northern Ireland has come on in leaps and bounds. My neighbour will probably go back to Switzerland or Germany if the university research funding dries up.
The bullshit about the “unelected beaureaucrats” is exactly that. We elect MPs to the European parliament and we get a veto over any legislation. We have rejected remarkably little.
I like the fact my human rights are enshrined by law. The Tories in their Brexit panic threatened to do away with it.
I waited in vain for the £350 million a week for the NHS. The Tory promises of more police or more money for the NHS doesn’t even make a dent in the damage done by ten years of austerity. Turkey was never going to join the EU, more’s the pity.
If you Google “leaver lies” you’ll find plenty of collated lists. If an unworkable Brexit had gone through, I’d have been off to Asia.
So anyhow, here’s to a future of being part of one of the largest free trade areas in the world, Schengen and the Euro.”
So this is all about getting started with AWS. I’ve been using AWS tangentially for about five years, almost always EC2 instances, so not really pushing the envelope. I’d really like to get my head round serverless and lambdas but I’m having a bit of a conceptual problem trying to work out a use case to do at home.
I have done the Udemy “AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exam” which was quite frankly brutal, demanding 90% for three papers. First time through each I got 70-80% which I thought wasn’t too shabby but obviously not good enough for their arbitrary cutoff. The second time through I got >90% which was nice.
The biggest takeaway I have is once you’ve created a root account, create a user account and only give it only the privileges it needs. Security you know!
This is the list of white papers I’ve ingested to far. I hope it proves useful.
This is the motherlode. If you want an overview of all available services on AWS, this is the place to start. For us in the perl world, that’ll be git, CI/CD pipelines and EC2/Fargate. If you’re jiggy, docker too. At this point for most of that, I like Gitlab, especially since M$ took over github.
AWS Well Architected Framework
This takes the overview one step further. Apparently as you partition your app vertically, VPSs are the trick. Security again.
In a good chunk of the contracts I’ve done, the developers have been good boys and written tests, but there was no way of automatically running them. Jenkins fixes this. Better still using the Perl TAP output formatter we can get a nice graph of the number of tests increasing. If you like, you can run Bamboo or GoCD but I’ve not had happy experiences with either of these.
Practising Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery on AWS
Taking Jenkins one step further. In an ideal world code gets committed to master and then gets made live. Your process may vary. Oh, and database versioning is Hard. I’m reliably informed squitch is the one for this.
Now we start getting to the docker meat. I’m not sure how applicable this is to a clunky monolithic Perl framework. I dockerised a simple Catalyst app and it was HUGE. Back to CGI.pm?
A common whinge I’ve heard is that unless you’re careful and out of the free first year tier, is that suddenly your AWS usage blooms into thousand of pounds a month. Having been charged £15 a month for static IP I can well believe it.
Kubernetes land is still a mystery to me. Every way I’ve tried to approach it, from linux to Mac I’ve been thwarted. Oh well, one day it’ll be mature enough and actually work for me.
So that’s what I have so far. I think most of the time, we’ll go EC2 and then RDS. I’d put Cloudflare on the front unless I particularly needed a Route53 feature. Serverless is still in the land of dragons and Perl isn’t spectacularly well supported. I’d like to see a world where the code pipeline is under Amazon as well as horizontal scaling with the load balancers.
This would be hilarious if it weren’t so serious. About 50,000 people got their printers hacked and had promotional printouts for YouTube Vlogger “PewDiePie” printed out. This raises the question: HOW? In the real world we should all be behind firewalls, all our computers should have anti-malware software on. This should not be an issue. Printers should not be connected to the internet!
More seriously, it’s possible to destroy computers from afar by repeatedly writing to their firmware. This is not a desirable outcome.
Please folks, if you want to talk about security, there are people like me out there who are more than capable of doing a quick audit and vulnerability scan.
So, PHP and MySQL, two slightly suboptimal technologies run a fairly large chunk of the internet in the form of WordPress. You have the idea for a blog or maybe want to knock up a quick corporate web site. What’s your first step?
Themes
Choose a WordPress theme. There are loads out there, some free some paid for. My site of choice for finding themes free or otherwise is Themeforest. A fair number of the themes are free, and you can choose 2 or 3 column, responsive and so on.
Having chosen your host (we use bluehost.com for www.pandaandpolarbear.com and this site), then it’s time to flesh out the functionality of your site with plugins.
Plugins
Akismet - a pretty good comment spam filter plugin. It will mark spam for you so you can you through and trash it. Not sure I’ve ever had a spam comment go through.
Cloudflare - These guys are making the internet better. A DDoS, CDN and free SSL solution. 128 data centres. Who is to argue with that?
Cookie Consent - Everyone needs this, right?
XML sitemaps. Does what is says on the can!
Jetpack - Even more themes, stats, SEO tools, Security stuff.
Loading Page - while the page is loading, shows a pretty graphic. Given the stats on site abandonment, any distraction is worth it.
NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster - lets you spam nearly 30 social media channels.
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) - Really useful to see where the CPU time is going and if a plugin is taking the time. In my experience, plugins take about 50% of the page render time.
W3 Total Cache - caching is good. Most site are not that dynamic so caching is relly good to have.
Wordfence Security - useful to have. We’ve had someone uploading rogue JavaScript to WordPress and this spotted it.
WP Smush - optimise graphics for the size you’re rendering them at. This is a cool speedup. When you’ve got four years of art, it’s a big win.
Yoast SEO - If you’re wordy like me, it’s good to have something reminding you of the good stuff to put in your posts to get the attention of the search engines.
Amazon Associates Link Builder - nice integration with Amazon associates.
Finally, Link checker - useful to check for broken links, or destination pages that have gone away.
Looking back over my LinkedIn, I have had the following gripes about recruiters and recruitment. As a contractor, I do the interview round two or three times a year, so this stuff is becoming second nature.
Recruitment gripes
Diction. I’ve had calls from English people who either mumble incoherently, have incoherent regional accents or are Indian with the same. Really guys, listen to Radio 4 and copy their accent.
Please don’t call me from a speakerphone in a room full of echos. Also, your phone system may well be crackly, out of date junk. Please get a modern system where I can hear what you’re saying.
I’m not Gordon.
If you call and I don’t pick up, LEAVE a succinct, clear message.
Have caller ID so if you fail at leaving a message, I can call you back.
If you do leave me a message, leave words. I really don’t want five minutes of your office background noise and you flirting with a co-worker.
If I contact you via LinkedIn or even by phone, PLEASE RESPOND. I’m trying to make money for you.
If you call me and the line drops, CALL ME BACK. Don’t just wander off and make out with a fellow recruiter.
LinkedIn, I *hate* being stalked by anonymous recruiters. Why do you allow this? Why are recruiters afraid to reveal themselves?
Recruiters, and job sites too. Why do you send me Java, Scala or Go jobs? I don’t do that. You’re wasting your time.
Please write literate adverts. I’m not a “principle” developer. Writing advertisement littered with spelling or grammar errors is doing you no favours.
Please make sure that the salary mentioned in the job headline matches what’s mentioned in the body. Come to that, mentioning a salary or day rate in the advertisement is a Good Thing.
Really research your client. Even yesterday I spoke to a recruiter who barely knew the client, didn’t know what their vertical sector was, and had a really sketchy job spec. At the very least, check out their profile on Glassdoor.
It’s REALLY nice to know where in the UK the job/contract is. Come to that, knowing where in LONDON the contract is would be nice. Docklands and Shepherd’s Bush are worlds apart.
Just because my CV isn’t littered with Jenkins, JIRA, Confluence and Git, doesn’t mean I don’t use them every day! They’re fundamental.
Recruiters, keep *your* web site jobs listings up to date. Get a job in, put it on your site. Fill a job, take it down. Otherwise, you’re wasting my time and yours.
Don’t spam me on my work email address. Straight to the trash, this one.
Don’t email me with barely a spec. I’ve just had two. What’s the point? “Must be good with computers.” Well, *duh*.
Don’t demand references up front. You’re just trawling for business.
Don’t demand ridiculous documentation like passport copies, A-level certificates, utility bills up front. That all comes AFTER the offer. I’ve worked for banks where that process took a day when I was being “onboarded”.
Don’t expect me to fill in a long, convoluted web form that replicates pretty much everything that’s in my CV. At least that’s optional with Jobserve.
Finale
And now, the big one. Back in the day, when I was CTO, I was hiring for a team of Linux, Perl developers. Not one of the people I hired had all of the things I was looking for. Some people were Java or PHP. One guy was a Windows dude. I hired them because they were GOOD PEOPLE and as it turned out, we built a great team, of expert Linux/Perl people.
Asking for 10 years of Python is essentially meaningless. These days we have Google and Stackoverflow. I’ve done Python and Ruby on this basis. It’s not hard. Anything can be learned. Unlike twenty years ago, there’s barely a question that hasn’t been asked, answered and blogged. I want the right PEOPLE, not your in-depth Node.js skills. Asking for particular knowledge is essentially meaningless.
So there you have it. The entire recruitment industry is based on a false premise and staffed by a proportion of cowboys and dodgy companies. Where have we heard that before?