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So far there is a distinct lack of snakes

In the dashboard which I hacked together at MMC RTV Slovenia, I display a set of related flickr searches based on the current state of the system. So far, there’s a distinct lack of snakes, volcanoes, lava, fire, explosions and other things that might freak an engineer out as much as a server outage. Thoughts: I like how the hosts are clearly marked when one of their metrics goes over a threshold.
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Flickr API

I’m currently applying for a Flickr API key, and this is what I put into the description for “HQ Dashboard”: “I’m building a monitoring dashboard which includes statistics data from internal sources, some tweets and, hopefully, an assortment of Flickr backgrounds based on current monitoring conditions (ie., search for fire/destruction/storm/tornado when servers are being overloaded, and grass/meadows/happy/coffee if the monitoring says everything is fine). In this way I plan to use the Flickr search to provide a visual representation of the severity level currently being experienced.
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API development methodology

I needed a way to create and connect only to those services I actually need to run. If I only need to connect to Redis, I don’t need to connect to MySQL as well. Leverage PHP language constructs to this end. Injecting dependencies should be language driven, not programmer driven. I want you to think about this. Language driven vs. programmer driven - this is the main point. When it comes to programmer driven dependency injection, it will happen that your programmer(s) will be using their time writing methods that will get, set and report missing dependencies.
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In process performance statistics with Redis

Every once in a while you need to do a sanity check of your code, how it performs and what you can do to improve it. This is most apparent with a code-base that is developed and refactored over a period of several years. There can be several problems that negatively impact performance due to dependency issues or legacy code that should have been removed but was forgotten during a refactoring sprint.
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