what we blog

What I Learned from Giving a Rust Training

Over the last three days, I've given my first full training on Rust to ensure there's now four people in Germany that can call themselves "trained Rust engineers". Thanks to everyone who attended and thanks to Linuxhotel for organising the training...

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Properly using Elasticsearch Script Filters

Elasticsearch comes with a vast number of filters and queries for all sorts of things, including special strategies and combinations of those. In some rare cases though, these are not enough. For these cases, Elasticsearch ships with the script filter, allowing arbitrary scripts to run on a document to decide whether it should be filtered or not.

These come at a high cost and are impractical to run on larger datasets. However, given the right approach, this can be mitigated.

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systemtap and Ruby 2.1 (on Ubuntu)

I like dtrace. I also like Linux. And thats where the problems begin: there is no proper dtrace for Linux. However, systemtap exists. systemtap is compatible to dtrace probes, however, it comes with it's own scripting language.

For those who don't know what any of these are: both are tools to efficiently trace programs at runtime, with a very low overhead. To allow that, they use so-called "probes" compiled into the program. Your kernel is usually equipped with such probes and Ruby 2.0 or higher also comes with quite a few of them.

However, the whole process is a bit involved and I found no good explanation for the whole setup and the pitfalls. Read on for my attempt. I will use Ubuntu as an example system.

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Decoupled first

In Frontend first, Andrzej Krzywda argues for developing Frontends without any backend interaction first to make sure that all the user flow works and where and what you actually need to persist. I'd like to present a similar approach, but on another level.

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ElasticSearch pre-flight checklist

I attended the ElasticSearch base training this week and took away lots of very interesting details. I can definitely recommend taking them, the training made a lot of things clearer to me. One of my most immediate benefits was that it allowed me to compile a little "pre-flight" checklist of things that should never be skipped when bringing an ElasticSearch cluster to production. To ensure that I don't forget it and you don't start into your ElasticSearch life with huge amounts of pain, I'll document it here. Thanks to bascht for proofreading and fixes!

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Getting bored of the Rails Monotheism

Every once in a while, this tiny quote pops up in my twitter feed. I am not even sure where it originated.

This time, it ended in this conversation with Steve Klabnik.

As someone who has seen and implemented several successful and clean projects using Sinatra and subsequently Padrino, I'd like to call anyone out who uses this or any similar quotes to easily and try to explain both projects from my point of view. It basically comes down to a point of misunderstanding of what both projects try to accomplish. It might also be some miscommunication in the community as a whole. And the biggest point is a community that dukes out things like this on Twitter using 140 character quotes.

Sorry if things might become a bit inconsistent, I am basically writing a few things off my chest that nagged me for a while. I'll start by explaining where I see both Sinatra and Padrino in the webframework ecosystem.

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Category: Open Source

Open source is the third category we'd like foster in this blog. We use a lot of open source and we write some as well. In this category, we'd like to talk about libraries we've found an like, changes to our own and things we learned in the process...

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