Programming fun at startup

Looks like these days bitching about email is my favourite topic. What can I do no matter what I do I just cant keep up with email flow.  The new kind of emails just keep increasing, I was doing a good job 2 years ago and close to inbox zero daily and was writing a lot of code but two things have increased the email flow to me recently: Internal reports about production montioring from Newrelic, haproxy, exception analysis by team.  Review requests.  This is a recent one. Most review requests are sent to Java review group and somehow I atleast need to spend 1-2 min on every email to first decide whether this is for me or not.  Even if there are 30 review request per day it consumes 30 min of my time just to make sense of it. Daily when I see 100 emails to be answered I feel disheartened that I cant write any code today.    Both above items are necessary evil, #1 has increased production stability so my weekends are less busy.  #2 I am hoping...

Monitoring tools exposes a lot of data and we use Nagios, cacti, graphite,newrelic, mixpanel, flurry, boundary and many more tools.  But one of the ask for Support and marketing teams is how can they internally know if something is wrong. We cant expect them to wade through so many systems and so many applications to make sense of what is operational and what is not.  For e.g. we use a lot of services to serve the cloud filer server solution and this is the first page of status of our services in new relic and it spans 2 pages. Support team and management relies on Operations team to notify them if an issue is on going. To make this easy I did a Proof of concept integration application responsible for serving main website with Statuspage.io.  The idea is simple Create public metrics in statuspage.io that are human readable. Query new relic and various systems for application status. Map new relic green/red/yellow status and other system status to statuspage.io s...

We run a complex system with multiple services and every 2 or 3 week we  update the Java applications.  I want to do it every week as most applications are stateless and can be patched anytime but the application serving the main website is using sticky session. We are working to make it failover sessions, once we do that, we can do mid week deployment and that will allow us to go faster than 3 weeks.  This week I pushed a huge infrastructure change related to user Id generation. I had asked ops team to check the status of new relic after the midnight deployment and it looked like this so everyone was happy. I woke up and checked new relic mobile app and things looked ok to me. After finishing my morning routines I ran my daily exception report and one thing that caught the eye was 90K exceptions in last 12 hours in one of the files I had changed.  To gauge the impact I went in new relic and it showed me an error rate of 0.07 in one of the app I then check...

It seems I have become an EmailSlave. The first half of the day is spent in just answering to emails. There are so many emails where I am copied but I need not be. There are many emails  where its a 1-2 page email and somewhere down someone says @KP please answer this.  So it seems daily my work schedule is: Signin to newrelic and check anomalies for 15 min.  Check emails related production exception report and yes there are a ton of these report daily. Need a better tool here as this model is not scalable. I need to reduce the incoming data at me to only see relevant data like what newrelic does. May be I need to create a webapp out of these emails. Check emails for next few minutes before team calls Do team calls Then again back to checking emails until a I have taken a best shot at answering everyone waiting for my reply. Attend team meetings on Tue/Thu Being an architect and coder at heart I don't feel satisfied at end of the day if there is nothing tangible...

My wired mouse in home setup is as old as I started working from home for my employer. Suddenly this week the scroll wheel would scroll up fine but it would not scroll more than one page, you had to scroll up half page before it would resume scroll down. At first I thought its my Firefox upgrade but soon I noticed same issue in eclipse and terminal.  In evening I use the laptop without wired mouse and it would work fine. That led me to conclusion that issue is with mouse.  In USA people have a replace mentality, if something is not working and cheap, you can replace it. I was this close to ordering a new mouse on amazon when I thought let me shake it to see if something is stuck, but nothing came out.  I then saw a small screw in bottom, I unscrew it and I hit the jackpot, I was like wth "Lint". My friend had similar issues with Lint in Iphone5 when his iphone wont charge and we used a breadtie to get out the lint and it was charging fine. I was like yay problem solve...

http://astartupguy.blogspot.com/2014/12/can-you-remain-fullstack-developer.html

I am intrigued by this webhook concept and it seems a very nice way for B2B communication.  Webhooks are powerful and it eliminates Poll for integrating with third parties. All you need is to have some REST api registered that will be called when an event occurs. A good e.g. of webhook for a cloud storage provider can be  "automatically print this document on registered printers when a file is dropped in this folder". Lets assume all the customer needs to do is register a webhook "http://xyz.foo.com/printer/xxd344/print?token=authTokenXXX and the cloud storage provider can then call this url and POST the body of document in input. Recently I had a chance to play with webhooks when I was trying to move jenkins to EC2 for my f riend and as part of it I moved his svn to assembla.com.  I saw webhooks and I thought I can integrate commits into svn hosted by assembla.com to pivotaltracker.com tickets.  It took just 1 hour to do it but it was fun, apparently there are po...