My post from the other day about slow instance starts on Azure caused some commentary (mainly on reddit) that prompted me to think more about all this. In the end, there were a few more experiments I wanted to run to see if I could squeeze more performance out of Azure. First off, looking at…
Author: mikal
Why is Azure so slow to start instances?
I’ve been playing with terraform recently, and decided to see how different the terraform for launching a simple Ubuntu instance in various clouds is. There are two big questions there for me — how big is the variation between OpenStack derived clouds; and how painful is it to move between the proprietary clouds? Part of…
Coming to grips with Kubernetes in 2020: podcasts
It has become clear to me that it is time to care about Kubernetes more. I’m sure many people have cared for ages, but the things I want to build at the moment are starting to be more container based now that I am thinking more at the application layer than the cloud infrastructure layer….
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
This book discusses science and technical communication from the perspective of someone who comes from professional theatre and acting. Alan explains how his accidental discovery of the application of theatre sports to communication created an opportunity to teach technical communicators how to be more effective. Essentially, the argument is that empathy is essential to communication…
Prometheus 2.12, query logging, and startup failures on macos
Prometheus v2.12 added active query logging. The basic idea is that there is a mmaped JSON file that contains all of the queries currently running. If prometheus was to crash, that file would therefore be a list of the queries running at the time of the crash. Overall, not a bad idea. Some friends had…
An animated GIF resume
The graphic designer at work and I were talking, and I challenged him to come up with a resume as an animated GIF. This is where he landed… I think its quite clever. Need a graphic designer or video team? Consider onefishsea.
The wonderful world of machine learning automated lego sorting
Inspired by Alastair D’Silva‘s cunning plans for world domination, I’ve been googling around for automated lego sorting systems recently. This seems like a nice tractable machine learning problem with some robotics thrown in for fun. Some cool projects if you’re that way inclined: Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego A lego sorter using tensorflow This…
What is the Spotify model for Agile?
The other day someone said to me that “they use the Spotify development model”, and I said “you who the what now?”. It was a super productive conversation that I am quite proud of. So… in order to look like less of a n00b in the next conversation, what is the “Spotify development model”? Well,…
Quick hack: extracting the contents of a Docker image to disk
Hello! Please note I’ve written a little python tool called Occy Strap which makes this a bit easier, and can do some fancy things around importing and exporting multiple images. You might want to read about it? For various reasons, I wanted to inspect the contents of a Docker image without starting a container. Docker…
Mastermind in JavaScript
I’ve been learning JavaScript for the last few days, and I figured I’d implement Jacqui’s favourite board game as a learning exercise. Jacqui loves a simple colour guessing game called Mastermind. In the game someone picks four coloured pins and then the player has to progressively guess what those colours are. In my JavaScript version…