Skip to main content

Doing side project keeps you motivated and make you smart in your real job

I am already in 5th year in the company and its the usual 4 year itch. Things have not become boring in the startup but for past year I have become a sweeper. It seems we found this nirvana in mysql and I am transforming all products to store the data in a sharded mysql to solve the scalability issue in that component.  Cloud file system is a field that is yet to be cracked and we scale now to store billions of rows and we can continue to add mysql and scale but there are still interesting problems like how to scale a single customer to 100M+ files. We currently can scale to 10M+ files for live data and 25M for long lived archival data.  But again daily its boring as nothing new to learn.

So how to motivate yourself when you work from home and your work is becoming boring. Well do a side project, open source or something that you want to do but cant introduce at your company. I started reading hadoop but again I was just reading but not doing it.

Then one of my friend came up to me and said he wanted to move the build system for his side project into EC2 and can I help him. I was like why not, I did it free of charge over 1 hour daily in night for 2-3 months but in this process I learnt a lot about :

  1. Jenkins and how to spin new slaves and launch remote builds
  2. EC2
  3. how to install CentOS on EC2 and use yum
  4. Nginx
  5. Monit
So doing side project keeps you on toes and in turn makes you smart because now I can see how can you make things better at current company also. But in our case looks like our startup was already better at these components but hey now when I am debugging a monit or nginx issues I can figure things on my own rather than being dependent on someone. So in  turn it makes me fast and smart at my day job. Also I know little bit about EC2 and CentOS.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Haproxy and tomcat JSESSIONID

One of the biggest problems I have been trying to solve at our startup is to put our tomcat nodes in HA mode. Right now if a customer comes, he lands on to a node and remains there forever. This has two major issues: 1) We have to overprovision each node with ability to handle worse case capacity. 2) If two or three high profile customers lands on to same node then we need to move them manually. 3) We need to cut over new nodes and we already have over 100+ nodes.  Its a pain managing these nodes and I waste lot of my time in chasing node specific issues. I loath when I know I have to chase this env issue. I really hate human intervention as if it were up to me I would just automate thing and just enjoy the fruits of automation and spend quality time on major issues rather than mundane task,call me lazy but thats a good quality. So Finally now I am at a stage where I can put nodes behing HAProxy in QA env. today we were testing the HA config and first problem I immediat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adding Jitter to cache layer

Thundering herd is an issue common to webapp that rely on heavy caching where if lots of items expire at the same time due to a server restart or temporal event, then suddenly lots of calls will go to database at same time. This can even bring down the database in extreme cases. I wont go into much detail but the app need to do two things solve this issue. 1) Add consistent hashing to cache layer : This way when a memcache server is added/removed from the pool, entire cache is not invalidated.  We use memcahe from both python and Java layer and I still have to find a consistent caching solution that is portable across both languages. hash_ring and spymemcached both use different points for server so need to read/test more. 2) Add a jitter to cache or randomise the expiry time: We expire long term cache  records every 8 hours after that key was added and short term cache expiry is 2 hours. As our customers usually comes to work in morning and access the cloud file server it ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spring 3.2 quartz 2.1 Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.

I am trying to enable HA on nodes and in that process I found that in a two test node setup a job that has a frequency of 10 sec was running into deadlock. So I tried upgrading from Quartz 1.8 to 2.1 by following the migration guide but I ran into an exception that says "Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.". After looking into spring and Quartz code I figured out that now Quartz is more strict and earlier the scheduler.addJob had a replace parameter which if passed to true would skip the durable check, in latest quartz this is fixed but spring hasnt caught up to this. So what do you do, well I jsut inherited the factory and set durability to true and use that public class DurableJobDetailFactoryBean extends JobDetailFactoryBean {     public DurableJobDetailFactoryBean() {         setDurability(true);     } } and used this instead of JobDetailFactoryBean in the spring bean definition     <bean i...
7 comments
Read more