We’ve been running pretty hard the past few weeks, and many of the events we’ve been working so hard to prepare for have now happened and are past. Now that we have the chance again, let’s catch our breath, take the time to evaluate how things went, and then look to what’s coming next. We’ve … Continued
You may know that this isn’t my line. It’s attributed to the late, great Vince Lombardi. I’m not much of a follower of American football, but I know that accomplished musicians will say the same thing. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect; perfect practice does. The thing is, what you practice is what you learn. Muscle … Continued
Whatever you do this week, do it on purpose. There are only 168 hours in the week, and many of them will be (rightly) spent sleeping, eating, and relaxing. Regardless of how you spend your time, give the task at hand your full attention and focus on the present moment. Working on a project? Consider its impact. Choose your … Continued
Third in a series. Read the first and second posts. Like I explained in the first two posts, one of the more useful ways of debugging web application problems is interrogating the DNS system, and the tool to do it is already on your computer: dig(1). So, I was researching how Amazon’s ElastiCache works to debug a … Continued
Second in a series. View the first post here. In the last post introducing the dig(1) command, you’ll recall seeing an entry like this: $ dig +noall +answer google.com google.com. 300 IN A 216.58.216.238 Every DNS record has a similar format to this, and the fields are: Name The domain name. TTL Time To Live, the … Continued
First in a three-part series. Read parts two and three. While debugging an issue with ElastiCache for the Star Tribune, I had a chance to use a public Internet research tool that not many people know about: The global DNS system. Research tool? Yes, although most everyone thinks of DNS as a new-fangled form of Yellow Pages that … Continued
This week, do without doing. Be at one with your work. Cultivate a still and watchful mind as you work, so as to see the most natural way to design or implement something. Find your flow and the task will be accomplished without effort. Make simple changes to things as they are; then the change … Continued
This year I had the pleasure of serving as a Google Summer of Code mentor on the Mercurial project. I’ve been using and contributing to Mercurial for about five years, and was made a core contributor about a year ago. With three students, we were among the smaller Summer of Code mentoring organizations, but all three students contributed some very … Continued