I was recently giving a friend some advice on how to set up a minimal stack for a starter project, and somewhere along the line realized that my MVP was approaching a dozen different AWS services. Time to stop and start reevaluating life decisions, people. So, I went back to the drawing board, and set up […]
Tag Archives: devops
Consider the generalist software engineer. She has a solid grasp of CS fundamentals, knows several programming languages, can write scripts, program user-facing front-end code, and work on deep algorithmic problems in the backend. For her, coding is a set of logic puzzles, debugging, patterns and anti-patterns, architecture, and tradeoffs between fast, cheap, and good. Most developers […]
At TripAdvisor, the devops team managed about 400 physical servers spread across three server rooms. We ordered and provisioned new hardware, scavenged parts (and sometimes whole servers) from the live site teams, replaced hard drives, installed and upgraded OSes, rebooted, rewired, and were generally on call for all manner of problems. What a pain. I mean, seriously, […]
As I mentioned in my last post, my startup has just shipped its first public release! It’s a good feeling to be iterating instead of writing from the ground up, and I thought it would be a good time to take a deep breath and reflect on where we’re at. Architecture Scratch is built using an entirely Javascript […]

I’ve been working in DevOps for just about exactly one year now. Different companies call their teams different things, but at TripAdvisor we divide Operations into the following buckets: TechOps: Live site hardware. This includes managing the data centers, racking and kickstarting servers, setting up firewalls, routers, load-balancers, networking, DNS, bandwidth, certs, and so on. SiteOps: […]