Build your own “data warehouse” for reporting purposes in a multi-services environment
This blogpost was originally posted on the Fretlink Tech blog while I was working there in march 2021
Tech companies nowadays swear by data-driven decisions. It can be good for specific business KPIs, however, if taken too far it can lead to incorrect optimisations (too local), social pressure on your employees, incorrect business decisions, metrics with no meaning.
Having sharp insights into your business and your technological resources is important, don't get me wrong. But we will try to show in this article what pitfalls to be aware of when going towards the “data everywhere” mantra. And also how we transformed our way of dealing with data at Fretlink in the past 2 years.
Disclaimer: this blog post presents our approach and solutions considering we have “reasonably big data” (as opposed to “big data”) with our biggest tables containing between a few million rows (106) and a few hundred million rows (108).
Adding Fun to the Configuration Burden
This blogpost was originally posted on the Fretlink Tech blog while I was working there in 2020
Did you ever enjoy writing XML files by hand? No, OK, I thought so. Was it better with JSON? No. What about YAML where the indentation is so easy right? No, none of these are enjoyable. The reason for all these no is simple: formats are meant to be read or written by machines and not by humans.
As computing folks we most probably prefer to write code because programming is what gives us the control over machines' behaviour. Follow me into the fabulous world of programmable configuration files. I'm pretty sure your will like it.
DotScale 2018 (Yet Another Conference Blogpost 🙈)
Once again the DotConferences team organised a really nice one-day one-track conference in Paris. Thanks a lot to them, to the speakers and the audience. DotScale 2018 was a very fine edition!
They managed to have very nice and experienced speakers, from diverse backgrounds (academic, industry, tech advocates) and with various subjects. It was my fifth DotConference since I live in Paris! Wow time flies by.
You will find below a few notes of the day if you want to have a general idea of what happened there.
If you prefer to watch the complete talks, videos should be made available from the DotConferences team.
pgDay Paris 2018
Once again this year the great staff of pgDay Paris did it all. We had a very good pgDay Paris 2018 edition. A great location in the center of Paris near Beaubourg. A diverse and interesting line-up. And as usual, a joyful community.
PgDay Paris 2017
PostgreSQL is known to be a very good relational database system. Because it is robust, because it has all the features that modern RDBMS databases systems expects. On top of that it is an open source and free software with a very wide community behind...
Common tricks for a good Nginx configuration
After more than 3 years trusting Nginx to serve customer traffic I decided to list here a few common use cases I came up with. First in my previous working experience where I migrated the public facing webservers from Apache to Nginx. And now in my current job where I configure and maintain most of the Nginx configurations.
The following tips are common configurations which could easily be reusable or useful for other people. However all the following examples being from my experience might not be the best solution so please do not hesitate to comment my choices at the end of this article :).
Ansible: a few tips from my experience
After using Ansible in a pretty big production platform I wanted to try to list here a few tips worth sharing for both beginners and regular Ansible users.
Notes from my journey at Velocity conf 2016 (Europe)
I had the chance to attend Velocity conf 2016 in Amsterdam thanks to my current employer Trainline (formerly Capitaine Train). This article is a minimal transcript of my journey there during the talk sessions.
Ruby build pipeline with Docker
Docker all the things \o/
You have probably seen people running all kind of things inside containers. Anything really, like a famous UI editor or a Tor relay for example.
When it comes to a server stack, some people would like to see Docker containers running in production everywhere. It can be a great idea if your production infrastructure is designed to run containers.
What if you still run dedicated instances or bare metal machines? Would you even want to use it?
A new place to share my software discoveries and curiosities
There has been a little while I wanted to create this mini-blog. I guess the panic monster finally came to say hello. So here it is I am happy to launch this site today! \o/!
You should expect some references here of my discoveries through my personal and professional IT projects. Mostly around software, automation, site reliability and distributed systems.