Author: Av
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Layoffs, industry safety, and where we go from here
A few days ago my friend Will Gallego wrote a fantastic piece on how the industry is less safe and less stable. From the cultures we’ve developed to the systems we maintain, everything has been shaken by multiple years and multiple rounds of layoffs. It’s been 7 years since I wrote a half-way useful blog…
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The Senior Engineer’s Guide to Helping Others Make Decisions
One of the areas I often see senior engineers struggle with, is raising junior engineers to the next level. Often this is because we don’t give them the space to explore, learn and understand how to approach problems for themselves. We’re going to look at three different scenarios to illustrate how decisions are usually made,…
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Temporary fix for Sony A7ii stuck shutter issue
Last week I purchased a Sony A7ii, which I absolutely love. The camera is fantastic for some many reasons that are covered by many reviews. Unfortunately I was hit by small known issue with some of the camera builds: sometimes, after you take a picture, the shutter will get stuck, and stay closed. The symptoms…
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The importance of benchmarking
As an operations engineer, my go-to philosophy is often “make it work first, then make it work better.” When you write a script, or apply a complex change, you don’t always have the luxury of making is perfect in the first iteration. As always, there are exceptions to this rule. In today’s case, I was…
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The case for distributed teams
Recently, Paul Graham wrote an essay, making the case to change immigration rules to allow more excellent programmers into the US. While Paul makes a number of excellent points, I think he’s missed the mark. There is a certain mindset in large parts of our industry that in order to succeed as a programmer, or…
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On-call with Google Hangouts
Over the last 15 years I’ve constantly found myself part of an on-call rotation where ever I have worked. It’s par for the course as an Operations Engineer. For many years I carried a Blackberry with me for two reasons: * Mostly reliable message delivery * Highly customizable notifications Message delivery reliability has increased well…
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My experience with United and US Airways
This is a tech blog, and I try very hard to present facts and technical advances here. However, this is simply a story that needs to be shared (mostly for my own personal expression, but I hope others find some benefit in it). What follows, is a copy of a compliment I sent to United,…
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Centos 6.3 DomU on a Debian Dom0
Warning: I recently went through this process, and took notes, but a few pieces here are from memory. If things don’t work as expected, please let me know and I’d be happy to help. Background I’ve been running Debian for a long time – probably steadily about 6 years now. Before that I was a…
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How to secure your facebook account
Something I never hear people ask me: “Av, how do I secure my Facebook account?” Which leads me to believe one of two things: Everyone knows how to secure their Facebook account People like myself have done a very poor job or explaining to you why you need to secure your Facebook account, and how…
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Speed up your android tablet
After using several mid-range and entry level Android tablets, I’ve become familiar with one striking problem they all seem to suffer from: very slow internal storage. This problem is especially noticeable on devices such as (some of?) the Coby tablets which have only one CPU core – when applications block on disk I/O, the entire…
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