There’s this local restaurant I go to a lot – it isn’t much to look at from the outside, and truth be told, the inside is kind of dingy. The menu is a mess of misspellings and grammatical mistakes inside a cracked, yellowing plastic sleeve, orders sometimes get lost, and one of the waiters is actively […]
TripAdvisor has a fair amount of physical hardware, and one of the devops team’s responsibilities was to manage the hundreds of servers in the development environment. We provisioned new machines, retired old ones, replaced controller batteries, and constantly upgraded, added, and replaced hard drives. Working in an AWS stack means not having to deal with most of that any more (huzzah!), […]
Like peanut butter and chocolate, cut and tr are two great commands that go great together. cut provides an easy way to grab one or more fields from a line of text, and tr allows you to prepare the line first. Let’s start with cut. Consider the following directory listing: # ls -l total 5392 […]
I’m not a Linux guru. I’ve always known just enough to get the job done, but was never focused on getting deep into the command line for its own sake. Ever since joining the devops team at TripAdvisor almost two years ago, though, and more recently taking responsibility for operations at Scratch, I’ve had to learn a much broader array […]
It’s that time, and with the enforced downtime that is the children’s end-of-year vacation, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on all the changes of the past 12 months (and, you know, actually start writing again). Settling into our new home, the children getting older, our daughter finally starting to grow some hair (we make […]
I love to cook. I love wandering through a grocery store looking for interesting ingredients, paging through cookbooks, chopping vegetables, measuring, mixing, sautéing, baking. As a programmer / manager, I don’t have that many opportunities to make something physical, but cooking is an intensely pleasurable experience, especially when the results match the intentions. Unsurprisingly, I don’t like […]
You wouldn’t think that a post like this would be necessary, but as I recently went through a frustrating bit of config hell in what I’d expected to be a straightforward process, I thought I’d write down the procedure that worked for me. Download and install Android Studio Download the latest version Follow the instructions […]
It’s been a couple of months since I left TripAdvisor, and as I’ve been coming up for air, I’ve been going through the necessary process of re-evaluating the conventional wisdom I’d come to accept over the past six and a half years. Some of it was great – generally applicable best practices that I’ll use for years to come. […]
We had a problem. Facebook had just come out with the Like button, and had provided code snippets that allowed you to badge pages with Like counts. The problem was that it took a couple seconds for the number of Likes to load, and in some cases the resulting text was bigger than the allowable […]
My uncle held on to his 56k modem for years. We tried, and tried, to persuade him to switch to broadband, but he was absolutely convinced that 56k was all that he would ever need or want. It wasn’t about the money, or the hassle, or an intentional desire to limit his internet use – he had […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 