Recent Readings

Web

Fixing UNIX Filenames – An interesting discussion of the non-standard handling of the “standards” in UNIX filesystem naming, such as newlines in names.

An ‘Accordion’ of Wood and Glass – A look at where all the money you spent on your calculus textbook went.

Strace – the Sysadmin’s Microscope – An excellent article on using strace(1), the best way to find out what your process is really doing in Linux.

Print

Garner’s Modern American Usage – Okay, I’ve not read the whole thing, but I keep it on my desk at work to figure out if my word choice is correct, or if it makes me sound like an asshole (and, all of the usage examples are from recent media, including great references to Superbad when needed).

Web Operations – Allspaw is listed as the author but this book is written by many people in the DevOps community (and hey, I reviewed Patrick DeBois’ chapter on monitoring). This book offers excellent practical advice to people doing web operations.

Rework – The 37signals guys wrote this book about the lessons they’ve learned running a successful startup, and while the book is pretentious, it does have solid advice (for example: don’t hire fast; don’t worry about being “professional”, build software you want to use).

Recent Readings

  • How MySpace Tested Their Live Site With 1 Million Concurrent Users – Until recently at ITA I ran the reservation performance testing group in operations and can appreciate how hard it is to do good performance testing, and the scale of this experiment is awesome. The article is light on details but the comment by Todd Hoff makes this worth a read.
  • 20 DevOps Guys You Should Follow – Smart people who blog about operations & development hanging out together.
  • What Is DevOps? – Another “What is DevOps?” post, but you should read it because it is by Damon Edwards and includes this image:


This pretty much sums it up. (via Damon Edwards)

  • Who Owns The Application – Collaborate and communicate.
  • A Few Billion Lines Of Code Later – Excellent article about the evolution of Coverity‘s static code analysis tool from a research project to a real product. I think this article does an good job of illustrating that what your customer wants and needs and is almost never what you expect. Everyone who has been in startup will identify with the problems Coverity faced (and is probably still facing).