Defining Your Hiring Process

 Posted on June 12, 2020  |  John Goulah

You’ve got the foundation for your startup built, and pretty soon you’re going to need to hire some people. There’s no HR department to lean on, and so its on you to define the hiring process from end to end. This article is about a few of the many things to be thinking about as you’re rounding out your high level process. I’m hoping to write some additional articles diving into some of these topics. [Read More]

Approximate Times to Update an RDS Instance

 Posted on July 9, 2016  |  jgoulah

Here’s a quick overview from an upgrade a couple months ago of an RDS instance type db.t2.medium to type db.r3.large. In addition to changing the instance type, we upgraded the disk from 64GB to 100GB, and applied a new parameter group. The disk increase by far took the longest amount of time. We clocked in at ever so slightly over an hour for the disk increase, while the instance upgrade only took a bit over 16 minutes. [Read More]
allocated storage  aws  cloud  modification  parameter group  rds  RDS upgrade  SSD  upgrade 

Why You Should Point Staging to Your Production Database

 Posted on March 30, 2016  |  jgoulah

I have been thinking about this topic more recently as I’ve just started working with a new infrastructure, and one of the things that I noticed is the staging database is a separate copy of the production database. It also happens to be a very old copy that has drifted, certainly in data and possibly in schema. It was likely put in place to avoid the perceived problem of new code possibly affecting production data in some critical way, and having a safe and solid environment to examine changes before they do hit production. [Read More]
databases  infrastructure  production  staging 

Configuring Chef for Provisioning

 Posted on March 22, 2016  |  jgoulah

If you’re working with infrastructure its good practice to describe it using code so that it is reproducible and consistent across servers and development environments. I’ve used Chef for quite some time and feel it is a pretty natural way to represent the source of truth for your servers, the packages installed on them, and their configuration. Chef can also be used as a provisioning tool, to bring your servers to life configured exactly to your specifications. [Read More]
aws  chef  configuration managment  docker  provisioning 

Running Strace in Docker

 Posted on March 8, 2016  |  jgoulah

I’ve been reverse engineering a new application setup and seemed like an appropriate place to try out docker. Spinning up a lightweight and reproducible environment is the goal and containerization is a reasonably efficient way to accomplish that. As I was looking into a problem with getting some services running properly, with little debug output and sparse documentation, I reached for the old trusty strace to see what was going on. [Read More]
containers  docker  seccomp  security  strace 

Go Deployment

 Posted on February 23, 2015  |  jgoulah

Intro In the spirit of the recent re-release of Deployinator, it seems timely to write a little bit about deployment. However, this is not a how-to on writing a Deployinator stack, but an overview of the high-level mechanics of getting a golang app deployed into production. Its worth mentioning that this methodology is just one of many ways you might go about deploying your app, but this is what has worked for me. [Read More]
deploy  deployinator  Deployment  Git  go  golang 

Dynamically Update Hypervisor Guest Info in Chef With Rehai

 Posted on July 6, 2014  |  jgoulah

Introduction It turns out this little tool is long overdue, as simple of a concept as it is, but also easy to misunderstand the use cases for, ours at Etsy however was very targeted. Several years ago we were hammering out our internal cloud infrastructure, using KVM/QEMU based solution that you can read about over here. We were populating our virtual machine frontend using Chef Ohai data as the canonical source of our system information. [Read More]
chef  configuration management  kvm  libvirt  ohai  rehai 

Stubbing AFNetworking Calls In XCode Unit Tests

 Posted on June 22, 2014  |  jgoulah

Intro A unit test by definition of testing the smallest possible part of the application, should eliminate all dependencies from the systems its interacting with. This in turn will remove any unknown or variable outcomes from the tests, focusing on the isolating the specific code you’re interested in. In the case of networking calls, it is unideal for tests that deal with the (un)marshalling of data to depend on the network. [Read More]
afnetworking  ios  mobile  ohhttpstubs  stubs  xcode 

Capturing A/V Multimedia Streams From the Browser

 Posted on June 12, 2013  |  jgoulah

Background I’ve recently been working on finishing up an application to help gather presentation feedback when demo’ing a talk for the first time in front of a live audience. The app will play back a video stream and overlay the audiences comments on top of the video in real time. However I haven’t open sourced it yet because there was a dependency on launching an external video application to do the recording, and have the user upload that to the server. [Read More]
audio  getUserMedia  MediaStreamRecorder  video  webm