Chris Henry's Blog

Testing the outcome of infrastructure provisioning is an operator’s bread and butter. Good cookbook tests create predictable automation, and can be added to once problems are inevitably discovered. Serverspec is a huge part of ensuring that infrastructure being provisioned via chef is actually in the desired state. Combining ruby’s builtin libraries to parse and manipulate configuration files with…

Apr 23, 2015

Coding Music, Spring 2015

Normally, I’m a big fan of music without lyrics or much adornment for coding, but for the past few months, there have been a few albums in my rotation that are pretty heavy on the lyrics and complications. This edition has four guitar heavy albums, and three with way more singing than usual. Antemasque , Antemasque Antemasque is a newish project from Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, from Mars Volta and At…

Apr 11, 2015

When to do it yourself

Your time is extremely valuable, and execution of your product is everything. When it comes to building out key pieces of infrastructure, the choice of whether to build it, buy it, or use open source is very personal, and depends on what the business really needs. You do things yourself when you need fine grained control of a resource, or require a deep understanding of a mission critical…

Mar 31, 2015

Flight Status

A few weeks ago, I was stuck in an airport for a couple hours. I was flying to San Francisco, and upon arriving to JFK, was informed my flight would be delayed several hours due to a ground delay program . A ground delay program is put in place when a particular airport’s ability to keep up with traffic is diminished. If your destination airport has a program in place, your takeoff will be delayed…

Nov 2, 2014

A Return

The past year has been an extremely busy one. There have been a number of challenges placed in front of me that were somewhat all-consuming. While there’s been plenty of introspection, much of it has been exceedingly private. My goal for the end of the year is to consider what I’ve learned in the past 9 or so months, and share it publicly. Wish me luck.

Sep 12, 2014

Inn on Randolph

This Christmas, Jessica and I took a trip to Napa Valley. In the past year, I’ve taken quite a few trips out to California, but most of them have been helicopter trips for work. I’ve flown in, done what I needed to do, and flown out, as quickly as possible. These trips have been grueling, as they were designed to get me home quickly, and never allowed any time for relaxation. It seemed important…

Dec 30, 2013

Eggs Benedict and Burgers

Since moving to New York, and discovering that there are more restaurants per square mile than any other place in the world, I’ve started eating out a lot. A probably unhealthy amount. But that’s OK, because everyone’s got to eat, right? And after eating at lots of places, I’ve discovered that there are certain gold standard dishes that most places are beholden to. The two that I’ve focused on are…

Oct 6, 2013

the wrong path

Robert Frost extolled the path not taken in his famous poem. It was a tribute to bucking the trend, and finding a place that was your own. In the go go go world of the tech industry, there are fewer paths untrodden, and many of them look wrong. And yet there are just as many reasons to go along those paths. Those reasons are specific to each context, and may look sunnier or darker depending on…

Sep 3, 2013

What it feels like to be DDoS'ed

The internet is hostile. Not because of trolls or flame wars or your opinion on gay marriage, but because people want to destroy you. For absolutely no fucking reason. DDoS attacks are the scariest thing in the world to someone running a website. The alerts will trickle in at first. It’ll just be a web sever or two that’s squawking. Then more. Then external monitoring will go off. Pingdom will…

Jul 29, 2013

RSS Resolution, and Blog Updates

After much neglect, and a few insane weeks, I’ve finally gotten the time to update a few things in my daily toolkit. First, RSS; I’ve decided to go all in with Feedly . I’ve found it to be a great cross-platform candidate that’s had to deal with a lot of scaling challenges in a very, very short period of time. I give them a lot of credit for building a massive platform and being able to continue…

Jun 30, 2013

GReader is going away, and I'm not that sad

There was a period where I was insanely into RSS. It was what I did every time I sat down at the computer. I fired up the Google Reader tab, and spent hours in there. I pored over everything, and it was a really fun game to try and get through everything and still retain at least one useful piece of information from my frenzied filtering. That was usually the case, as at that time, I had a pretty…

Jun 9, 2013

Making Decisions with Graphite

The DevOps mentality of “measure everything” can be really helpful in key moments when you need to make decisions. In particular, deploying two things side by side for the purposes of measurement can yield super helpful decision making information. For example, the Behance team was wanted to see how APC stacked up against Zend Opcode Cache . Behance has been running APC for several years, and…

May 5, 2013

Policy Fallacy

“The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you’re not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.” -Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny The worst arguments I’ve ever had were with people who weren’t willing to bend on policy in situations where the policy made no sense. Context is everything, and most policy is made for a…

Apr 14, 2013

First Byte

As we all may have some idea of at this point, performance on the web is one of the keys to success. However, finding actionable performance metrics can be a challenge. In the course of a web request, there’s a lot of stuff that happens. I’ll briefly explain it here in a couple run-on sentences. When you click on a link, your browser or client looks up the location of the server via DNS, and then…

Apr 1, 2013

AppArmor, Ubuntu and MySQL

The other night I was investigating a rather heinous utf8 issue. I was working on a local copy of Ubuntu 12.04 that contained the entire dev environment, except for data. So I exported a copy of the relevant data as a CSV, pulled it down, and attempted to run a LOAD DATA INFILE . Sane enough right? This is something I’ve done a million times in a bunch of different environments. However, in the…

Mar 8, 2013