Author: Dan

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Memory Leak

I received a “high memory usage” alert. Already panicking, I logged into New Relic and saw this terrifying graph: That’s a graph of memory usage, starting from when the server was created. For the uninitiated, when memory usage grows and grows and grows like that, chances are very, very high that you’ve got a nasty… Continue reading Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Memory Leak

So you want to move your Homebrew folder

By default, Homebrew gets installed under /usr/local. This is great, because it doesn’t require you to use sudo to install and upgrade packages. But the downside is that it turns your /usr/local directory into a git repository. If you don’t have any conflict with this, then by all means, stick with the default. I had… Continue reading So you want to move your Homebrew folder

Managers, Goals, and Performance

Key take away for me from “What Great Managers Do to Engage Employees” was this: Performance management is often a source of great frustration for employees who do not clearly understand their goals or what is expected of them at work. They may feel conflicted about their duties and disconnected from the bigger picture. For… Continue reading Managers, Goals, and Performance

History v. State

I want to reprogram the way I think about the state of my data models. Think of a blog post. Before I publish it, it’s unpublished. After I publish it, it’s published. If I unpublish it, it’s unpublished again. Maybe I edit it and republish it. Published again. I (and a lot of programmers, I… Continue reading History v. State

Things I did today

Among other things, in the past 24 hours, I’ve: set up an RDS MySQL instance made an RDS instance a replication slave of our database hosted with Linode fiddled with my bash prompt and other .bash_profile goodies made breakfasts and lunches for my 2 little kids made myself a lovely salad for lunch dropped my… Continue reading Things I did today

Welcome to mact.me

I’ve decided to use my mact.me domain name for this blog. The old domain name, yabfog.com, was just terrible. Enough was enough.

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What is it about Twitter?

I like people. I swear I do. It’s just that personal interactions tend to be extremely tiring. They take a lot out of me. And the larger the group of people, the more severe the energy drain. Same with familiarity: the less familiar I am with people, the more draining it is to interact with… Continue reading What is it about Twitter?

Easily prune your ssh known_hosts file

At some point, you’ve probably seen this message when you try to log in to one of your servers: This is really common when you have Amazon EC2 instances behind Elastic IPs because the IP address stays the same (and probably the hostname, too), but as new instances replace old instances, the new instances’ ssh… Continue reading Easily prune your ssh known_hosts file