The Brian Olore Story

This past week or so I’ve been concentrating on improving the performance of our system. Thankfully this isn’t a solo task and my teammate really knows what he’s doing. Luckily I was able to contribute based on my past experiences with things like cache settings in Apache, ulimit settings and other tweaks here and there.

We’ve uncovered a slew of things to work on. The first obvious place was to have the static content served by Apache rather than the mongrels. This has been on the todo-list for a long time, but has always fallen to the wayside. We knocked that off and looked towards the other items that were slowing us down. That’s when I uncovered some TCPSocket weirdness within memcache-client 1.7.4 that comes with activesupport 2.3.5.

During some tests we noticed a severe lag which we narrowed down to the fact that we were pointing to a list of memcached servers that contained one that didn’t exist. Turns out that when the memcached hostname resolves, but is not pingable, memcache-client 1.7.4 waits 3 seconds before responding with an error message (in addition it doesn’t mark the server as “down”, which I think is also a bug). This 3 second delay happens on RHEL 4, and in some brief tests on Ubuntu 10.9, it was even worse, taking over 30 seconds to respond. My guess is that there is some OS level setting that affects this, but I have yet to locate it. The fun part however, is that this problem does not exist in our old environment where we run acivesupport 2.1.2 which uses memcache-client 1.5.0.

Turns out, in 1.5.0, the memcache-client uses a 250ms timeout when calling TCPSocket.new. Something that was lost on the way to 1.7.4. Some initial tests of simply adding this CONNECT_TIMEOUT back in have been promising. It’s currently not throwing the right exception or marking the server as “down”, but once I do that, I will see about posting the source somewhere.

Tags: performance, ruby, timeout

One of the things I really like about my new job is pair programming. On Tuesday of this week, there was a bit of a panic as we tried to figure out how we were going to get work done with everyone in different locations due to the impending snow storm on Wednesday. To me, it was almost comical. I mean, I had been working from home for the last 6 or so years. I never had someone looking over my shoulder as I wrote code. One day wasn’t going to be a big deal… was it? Given the way this team has worked for the last few years, there really was no plan for how to operate when we aren’t all in the same room.

There was talk of iChat and sharing screens and some other not-so-simple-to-setup environment stuff, but in the end we coordinated what we were working on via chat and agreed we’d pair up on Thursday to review changes/updates we made or wanted to make. Even though I ended up doing the same on Thursday (no plow on my street all day, I couldn’t leave the house!), I was able to be productive and reviewed my work today with some team members.

It was weird working from home again. It was definitely different – I had to use my home laptop and my office space was a bit of a wreck. It took a little while to get totally setup with the VPN etc, but I ended up cranking out some good work.

My final conclusion is that I really like pairing, and working in an open space. Maybe I have great teammates, maybe I’m still in the honeymoon phase of pair programming, who knows, but for now, I’m loving it.

Tags: pair programming, snow, team

Worst parts of my new job:

1. No more personal bathroom
2. Coordinating my attire
3. Not being able to pick through leftovers for lunch
4. I can’t (easily) hit the gym at say 11am.
5. No laptop, no cell phone
6. No one cared if I had bad breath when working from home!

Best parts of my new job:

1. The people – incredibly smart, and unbelievable willing to take time out of their day to explain how something works or why something was done a certain way. The openness is infectious.
2. Pair programming with really smart people, like David Black
3. No email. OK not ZERO email, but with everyone working in the same place, email is rarely used.
4. No conference calls. Literally none. I had one on my first day which was a “Welcome to Boeing” deal, but zero since.
5. Ruby & Rails – No more Java, no more WebSphere Portal
6. No laptop, no cell phone. My day is now done when I walk out the door. I can VPN in to check my mail, but see #3

It comes as no surprise to me that the toughest things am dealing with so far are all related to no longer working from home. I’m not completely over the fact that I now get up at 6 & get into the office at 7:30, but I think I am getting used to it. I feel like an old man sometimes going to bed before 10, but I could be doing worse.

Of course the title of this post was written to make you want to read it. I’m really enjoying the new job but need gimmicks to get people to come read my stuff 

A few weeks ago, after 10 fun years at IBM I left and took a new job with Skarven Enterprises, a Boeing Company. I call my years at IBM “fun”, because they were – I really did enjoy my time there. Tons of great projects, always playing with new technologies, building applications that targeted all 300,000 IBMers, and most of all, making so many good friends along the way.

At IBM I did a lot of development, in what I now realize was in a non-traditional environment, for better or worse at times. Skaven is hardcore into Agile. It’s actually a fairly thin layer on top of what I was most doing at IBM (other people are worrying more about the semantics of Agile right now), but it adds enough structure & reporting to make me feel like management is aware of what’s going on. It’s kinda cool to be learning about Agile at the same time as a Sprint is already in progress – it’s a great way to pick up on things quickly.

In my new position I’m going to be doing Ruby on Rails development, which means I have to actually learn it! I’m currently going through lotsa of learning: the system, the development environment, Agile, scrum… and the roads to get there! I’m really psyched, and I can’t wait to contribute some real work. That should be coming in the next few weeks after I “pass the Qualifications Board”.

I’m going to start trying to blog more as I figure out exactly what I’m doing 

Tags: boeing, ibm, skarven

I love being able to install games to by Xbox 360. It makes playing much quieter & stuff seems to load faster. Unfortunately, like PC games I’ve played in the past, playing a game from the hard drive requires the disc to be in the player. Makes sense, as it proves that I didn’t copy it from my buddy & pass it around.

Here’s the thing…. it sucks!

I’m no more lazy than the next person, but come on! I mean, I can turn the console on & off with the wireless remote. I change the turner on my TV with my remote & I’m off & playing .. as long as the game is in the console.

So here’s what we do:  I usually keep my games close by my console anyway (for easy access – cuz they need to be in to play) so why not install some kind of RFID or wireless thing-a-ma-bob that is part of the game case. The console can just check if it’s in range – and preseto – I don’t have to get off my lazy butt to play!

Tags: gaming, ideas, xbox360