Finishing what you started

A quality of a good Startup engineer is "Finishing what you started". I value finishers more than people who talk good theory and start many things but don’t finish most of them. Most of the time people get excited and start many things concurrently but leave them in limbo or they finish 95% of the thing. Over 7 years at my current Startup I have observed that in many projects doing first 95% may take you X units of time but its the remaining 5% that demands 10x cognitive effort and time from you. Its this last 5% where people either burnout or give up. Its the finishers who keep the compass pointing to North star, never give up and do what ever it takes to Finish( in indian mythology saam, daam, dand, bhed).

Recently One of my respected colleague "Sachin" left for a sabbatical. He was one of the Finishers whom I would hire any day on my team or would choose as a buddy to watch your back. "Sachin" has a zeal like a Rhino or Triceratops to Finish what he started and for this I value him the most. Best of luck to him and I hope he gets bored with sabbatical and joins back :).

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RabbitMQ java clients for beginners

Here is a sample of a consumer and producer example for RabbitMQ. The steps are
Download Erlang Download Rabbit MQ Server Download Rabbit MQ Java client jarsCompile and run the below two class and you are done.
This sample create a Durable Exchange, Queue and a Message. You will have to start the consumer first before you start the for the first time.

For more information on AMQP, Exchanges, Queues, read this excellent tutorial
http://blogs.digitar.com/jjww/2009/01/rabbits-and-warrens/

+++++++++++++++++RabbitMQProducer.java+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
import com.rabbitmq.client.Connection; import com.rabbitmq.client.Channel; import com.rabbitmq.client.*; public class RabbitMQProducer { public static void main(String []args) throws Exception { ConnectionFactory factory = new ConnectionFactory(); factory.setUsername("guest"); factory.setPassword("guest"); factory.setVirtualHost("/"); factory.setHost("127.0.0.1"); factory.setPort(5672); Conne…

Logging to Graphite monitoring tool from java

We use Graphite as a tool for monitoring some stats and watch trends. A requirement is to monitor impact of new releases as build is deployed to app nodes to see if things like
1) Has the memcache usage increased.
2) Has the no of Java exceptions went up.
3) Is the app using more tomcat threads.
Here is a screenshot

We changed the installer to log a deploy event when a new build is deployed. I wrote a simple spring bean to log graphite events using java. Logging to graphite is easy, all you need to do is open a socket and send lines of events.
import org.slf4j.Logger;import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory; import java.io.OutputStreamWriter; import java.io.Writer; import java.net.Socket; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Map; public class GraphiteLogger { private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(GraphiteLogger.class); private String graphiteHost; private int graphitePort; public String getGraphiteHost() { return graphiteHost; } public void setGraphite…

What a rocky start to labor day weekend

Woke up by earthquake at 7:00 AM in morning and then couldn't get to sleep. I took a bath, made my tea and started checking emails and saw that after last night deployment three storage node out of 100s of nodes were running into Full GC. What was special about the 3 nodes was that each one was in a different Data centre but it was named same app02. This got me curious I asked the node to be taken out of rotation and take a heap dump. Yesterday night a new release has happened and I had upgraded spymemcached library version as new relic now natively supports instrumentation on it so it was a suspect. And the hunch was a bullseye, the heap dump clearly showed it taking 1.3G and full GCs were taking 6 sec but not claiming anything.

I have a quartz job in each jvm that takes a thread dump every 5 minutes and saves last 300 of them, checking few of them quickly showed a common thread among all 3 data centres. It seems there was a long running job that was trying to replicate pending…

Programming fun at startup

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