Ljubljana, Slovenia

Tumblr

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.
Read more

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.
Read more

API development methodology
Let's say you're writing an API service. You need this API to be highly available, distributed, fast... the requirements are several pages long. The problem with API calls is, that one call might not use the same cache objects as another, uses different data sources due to partitioning or other technical reasons. A typical PHP programmer might just create an instance of every cache class, database class and others he might need.
Read more

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.
Read more