It’s been awhile since I’ve posted something systems engineering related; frankly, it’s been awhile since I’ve had the time to read anything systems engineering related.
I found this piece on the performance impacts on HTTP/2 of packet loss quite interesting.
https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/10/http2-issues.html
So I’ll admit to playing video games. It is a guilty pleasure indeed. I spend most of my ‘game time’ on Eve Online but that requires a fair amount of contiguous time to really enjoy.
If I’m into a quick fix I’ll fire up World Of Warships and send a few fellow gamers to the depths of the WWII era Pacific Ocean.
Today they issued a big update to the game and my PC refused to download the update. A quick look at my firewall indicated it was being blocked as being “a suspicious Torrent download”. Normally it would be a simple case of adding the update server to my firewall ‘good guy’ list and all would be well. As it happens, in this case there are several servers involved so I had to track them all down and add them all. I thought I’d share my findings in case anyone else would find it useful (read: In case I forget in the future).
92.223.96.13, 92.223.96.14 92.223.118.4, 92.223.118.6 92.223.120.9, 92.223.120.11
These IPs served my location in Northeast North America – YMMV
Yes, I do. Along with a bunch of other non-hip tools such as PHP, Apache, Squid,MySQL – I guess that makes me ‘old-school’. 😉
I came across a blog post today that identified an entire toolset for PERL based development ground in today’s best practices for software engineering. Good stuff.
https://engineering.semantics3.com/2016/06/15/a-perl-toolchain-for-building-micro-services-at-scale/
This piece covers performance testing done on the ext4 and xfs Linux file systems. Specifically it examines the relative performance of each with a specific type of workload; write-only, append-only.
http://epickrram.blogspot.com/2015/12/journalling-revisited.html
Netflix have posted an outline of their video encoding workflow. It’s very light on details but it is an interesting read.
http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/12/high-quality-video-encoding-at-scale.html
http://thecodist.com/article/yes_i_still_want_to_be_doing_this_at_56
Although I don’t have quite as many notches in my keyboard as this author I can certainly identify with his point of view. I haven’t been a ‘professional coder’ for many years but I still do write code most every day. I’ve evolved into a ‘technologist’; one who knows a good deal about a great many things yet is not expert in any. I’ve consciously given up the role of ‘expert’ on any given topic and traded it for a broad understanding of how all the pieces fit together.
Is it more valuable to be the ‘go to’ person for all things Javascript or, someone with experience ranging from COBOL to Node.js, video streaming to VoIP and embedded systems to data-center systems engineering? Frankly, I believe it takes about the same level of effort to do either. I spend a good portion of my waking hours reading; staying current (and relevant) can be a full time job in itself. I’ve come to learn of myself that I’m most rewarded by having a wide knowledge base rather than a deep one. The problem with being an expert on a given technology is what do you do when that technology is no longer relevant?
I don’t win contract coding gigs anymore, but frankly I don’t want them; the vast majority are too narrow in scope to be interesting and make money for someone else. I’m much happier consulting small businesses on how to improve their efficiency and lower their costs, advising start-ups on what NOT to do when rushing head-long to build the next-big-thing and running my own companies.
I love what I do and I’m quite happy to not be an expert thank-you-very-much.