dan/blog

I spent today in the garden, only to find the following quote when browsing through the Pragmatic Programmer this evening:

Well, software doesn’t work quite that way. Rather than constructions, software is more like gardening – it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost. You may move plantings relative to each other to take advantage of the inter-play of light and shadow, wind and rain. Overgrown plants get split or pruned, and colours that clash may get moved to more aesthetically pleasing locations.

I think I found some old code in the garden. It stank, so I dug in into the ground to make our new raised beds.

Yesterday was the day of nothing new. Today we didn’t configure our servers.

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Here’s what’s clever about cloud computing: it’s nothing special and nothing new again and again.

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I’ve been reading lots about using git for deployment, but it doesn’t feel right. We’ve used SVN and git for deploying to single servers for years but I still think it’s fiddly and nasty. If I was forced to .jar it all up and deploy it would this make me a cleaner development. I dunno, so I asked StackOverflow.

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Until you’re about 20 you learn stuff all the time. Then you stop, and just recycle the same old junk again and again.

I’ve been hosting sites in the cloud – Amazon and Rackspace clouds – for a couple of year now, and I like being able to add and remove servers as needed but we haven’t been truely elastic.

And then our traffic increased. Lots. We had client sites getting 3, 4, even 300 times as many visitors and we’re on the cloud but we’re not using the cloud. This is important. Cloud computing looks like servers that are just cheaper and easer to create than physical servers. Anything easier than ten weeks of contracts, estimating traffic levels and a two week installation lead time and setup is easier… but it isn’t cloud and it isn’t elastic.

My mission, whether I choose it or not, is to create a completely elastic hosting configuration. Traffic goes up, so do the servers. It goes down. Servers do as well.

The key is use the cloud. Exploit the technology and don’t stick to using web servers in the way you’ve been using for the past 10 years (or more..!). Many companies I’ve spoken to use cloud and virtualisation technology simply to reduce their costs and make backup and recovery quicker, but this isn’t cloud.

Move static files to static servers.

All servers should be based on vanilla installations, with configuration at boot time so you can deploy changes quickly.

Build redundancy everywhere. If the servers are cheaper, have more of them.

I keep forgetting this…

doctype + tab, then select the type of html doc you need.

Create the HTML tag. Then head+tag followed by body+tag.

Will I remember now? no.

I’m reading Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, which pointed me in the direction of Think! for mac.

It hides all but one application so you don’t spend your life being distracted by email, google reader, IM, another email, wondering why that command-line was open, another email (this one from a cronjob, saying nothing interesting) and someone saying “thanks” on IM.

Concentrating would be so much easier if the internet didn’t exist, but Think! is a good second-best.

Get it from: http://freeverse.com/assets/apps/7013/app-page-image.jpg

As part of my rare and virtually non-existant series on debugging techniques, I’ve put together a Debugging Strategy Cheatsheet summarising the strategies for fixing code quickly and efficiently that I’ve collected from various sources.

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