Monday 27 October 2014

Link: Asshole culture at Uber

Uber, darlings of the startup world, have displayed particularly poor taste and utter thoughtlessness towards 50% of the population with a promotion that they have quietly removed (without comment) since it was recently denounced.

The article: The horrific trickle down of Asshole culture: Why I’ve just deleted Uber from my phone describes what happened.

Wednesday 15 October 2014

Link: schedule your sidetiq jobs for a specific timezone

Currently, "UTC" and "not UTC" are the only options available for scheduling your sidetiq workers...

Now, UTC is great if you're lucky enough to live in London - in which case, you can stop reading now. Or if all your systems happen to be set that way... though it doesn't let you accommodate local things such as daylight savings time-shifts.

So the only other option provided by sidetiq is "not UTC" which means you default to whatever timezone is set on your server... which is great if your server's local time is set to the timezone you actually live in... but, if, like most of us, your server is in an amazon cluster somewhere in Randomville America or somewhere on the sub-continent, you may not have that luxury either.

Then you need some way of making sure that your sidetiq workers run at 2am *for you*... instead during the middle of the midday-rush, slowing your servers to a crawl right when your users need you most...

Thankfully, here is a useful gist by toolmantim that lets you set the sidetiq time zone to whatever you'd like. eg it lets you do something like the following

  schedule_time_zone "Australia/Sydney"
  recurrence { daily.hour_of_day(2) }

Sunday 12 October 2014

Classic: Beating the Averages by Paul Graham

Beating the averages by Paul Graham

It's a classic. It's about lisp as a secret weapon, the building of viaweb and the blub paradox.

Thursday 2 October 2014

Sidekiq.❨╯°□°❩╯︵┻━┻

No, that's not me expressing my current frustration with Sidekiq not playing nice with mandrill-mailer... It's a real method on Sidekiq...

[1] pry(main)> Sidekiq.❨╯°□°❩╯︵┻━┻
Calm down, bro
=> nil

I found it while scanning the sidekiq test suite

  describe "❨╯°□°❩╯︵┻━┻" do
    before { $stdout = StringIO.new }
    after  { $stdout = STDOUT }

    it "allows angry developers to express their emotional constitution and remedies it" do
      Sidekiq.❨╯°□°❩╯︵┻━┻
      assert_equal "Calm down, bro\n", $stdout.string
    end
  end

<3 <3 <3