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defunct tech blog

Content I wrote for a tech blog from an old company. The blog is now entirely defunct

Keeping better secrets with Amazon’s KMS

defunct tech blog

Keeping better secrets with Amazon’s KMS

It is well-known that it’s a poor idea to store your application secrets in plaintext files, especially if they get committed to version control. So what should you do instead? Previously, we have attempted to solve this problem by having a file that only exists on the live environments,

Video: Functional Programming – Experiences in the Real World

defunct tech blog

Video: Functional Programming – Experiences in the Real World

Many of us have heard of Functional Programming, and all the benefits it brings to our code. But how can it be applied to real-world, running, production software? Ken Scambler (REA) and Robin Doherty (ThoughtWorks) will spoke to us about their experiences and lessons learned using Scala and Clojure in

Docker DNS & Service Discovery with Consul and Registrator

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Docker DNS & Service Discovery with Consul and Registrator

Consul is awesome, and super powerful, but takes a bit of understanding and setting up. We are looking at it now, because it could let us keep the same mechanism in place in development as we might use in production. What is Service Discovery? Service Discovery sounds pretty scary, and

Video: Stop Guessing! Talk to your Users and find out the Whys

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Video: Stop Guessing! Talk to your Users and find out the Whys

Tom shares our collaborative team process where everyone participates in planning and moderating with customer sessions to discover the right answers.

Automated infrastructure testing with ServerSpec

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Automated infrastructure testing with ServerSpec

By using automated rspec testing of our real infrastructure systems, We reduced the uncertainty around its operating environments, and decreased the amount of manual correctness checking that engineers have to do when provisioning new systems. So, what’s the problem? We have some “legacy managed” infrastructure, built by hand over

Learning with Guilds

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Learning with Guilds

Some time ago, we stumbled on a way of looking at organising development teams courtesy of Spotify. According to this paper (PDF, and also an excellent read), Spotify organise their teams in several orthogonal ways. We are quite similar. Introducing Guilds Spotify has Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds. Here, our

User Research: Notice-ability

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User Research: Notice-ability

We’re always interested in finding out more about our users, how they interact with the website, and what it is they’re actually trying to achieve when they’re on it. Now throw in some Arts and Crafts. What we get out is what’s called a Notice-ability Study.

Measuring a few things with statsd

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Measuring a few things with statsd

A little while ago, we realised that at having information about what was happening on the site right now would be useful for many things; including tracking and alerting us to the sorts of issues that wouldn’t necessarily be caught by more traditional means (such as Airbrake alerting). Having

Nokogiri goes bump (or segfaults) in the night…

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Nokogiri goes bump (or segfaults) in the night…

Recently we’ve been working on upgrading the version of Ruby the site runs on, from 1.8.7 to 1.9.3. We’re doing this for a number of reasons, including improved performance, new language features,and trying to stay relatively current with our tech. Things went fairly

Discovering Ruby 1.9.3 YAML parser performance

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Discovering Ruby 1.9.3 YAML parser performance

This is a tale of one of those times where it is actually useful to do code profiling and benchmarking. A bit of background: We’ve been in the process of upgrading our Ruby on Rails stack, going from Rails 2.3 to 3.0, with an eye to moving

defunct tech blog

Solr Tuning

Recently we noticed that one of our Solr replica processes (a piece of software we use to power the search features) was taking longer to respond to search queries than usual – enough to trigger a warning alert on our monitoring systems. On first inspection, we saw that the machine was