CatOps

​​With your help we managed to deliver 18 medical kits to the 27th Separate Bataillon!

We had a new request from them for the winter boots and a thermal vision. We had some money left from the previous fundraiser, so the winter boots are on their way to the frontlines already. Now, we are raising funds for the thermal vision!

The goal is 85k UAH (~2200 EUR). This is the price for the thermal vision, but we still have money left. So, we will “break” the Monobank jar as soon as we have the required amount from all the sources.

Also, we work together with the UA Responders foundation to be clear on all the legal stuff. So, you can also donate to their PayPal or SWIFT, since Monobank sometimes has issues accepting money from the EU cards. Please, put “27” in the message if you donate via PayPal or SWIFT, so we know that these money are meant for the 27th Battalion.

You can find all the requisites via this link: https://quicknote.io/145c93c0-6612-11ee-8acd-1fef365d67eb

Разом переможемо!

#donations

Today I just want to remind you about this fundraiser

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

Yes, I know that I skipped a week but I kinda had an excuse.

https://open.substack.com/pub/catops/p/catops-digest-2023-10-15

#digest #newsletter

For a bit longer than a week you can buy the Python Crash Course book from Humble Bundle with 45% discount.

I personally don’t use Python, but I know that it’s pretty popular in platform engineering. So, this offer may be interesting to you.

#books #programming #python hon

​​I know that y’all want to hear about the cUrl vulnerability. So, here you are: a first hand article from Daniel Stenberg (the author of cUrl) himself.

I haven’t read it yet, tho.

#security #curl

Let’s continue with Serverless. I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on Serverless is a collection of takes on Serverless. The author has collected and analyzed opinions on Serverless from Twitter (RIP), Reddit, Hackernews, ans other websites and broke them down into 3 categories: negative, positive, and neutral.

Tl;dr: as always, it depends. Serverless is no silver bullet. You have to architect your applications from ground up and choose tools fit for purpose - not jump on hype trains.

In any case though, there are some good comments about Lambdas and stuff in this article.

#serverless

​​With your help we managed to deliver 18 medical kits to the 27th Separate Bataillon!

We had a new request from them for the winter boots and a thermal vision. We had some money left from the previous fundraiser, so the winter boots are on their way to the frontlines already. Now, we are raising funds for the thermal vision!

The goal is 85k UAH (~2200 EUR). This is the price for the thermal vision, but we still have money left. So, we will “break” the Monobank jar as soon as we have the required amount from all the sources.

Also, we work together with the UA Responders foundation to be clear on all the legal stuff. So, you can also donate to their PayPal or SWIFT, since Monobank sometimes has issues accepting money from the EU cards. Please, put “27” in the message if you donate via PayPal or SWIFT, so we know that these money are meant for the 27th Battalion.

You can find all the requisites via this link: https://quicknote.io/145c93c0-6612-11ee-8acd-1fef365d67eb

Разом переможемо!

#donations

The Guardian tells a story of their migration into AWS Aurora Serverless.

This article doesn’t go too deep into technical aspects, but provides a nice overview of the issues one may encounter when trying to move to Aurora.

A couple of things that I found interesting:

- Whatever cloud migration tools are there, pg_dump and pg_restore are your trusted friends.

- This paragraph:


We’re spending roughly $220/month for storage and compute for the database. For the same price we could have rented a db.m7g.xlarge (16GB RAM, 4 vCPUs) Postgres instance along with 100GB of EBS storage or a db.r7g.large (16GB RAM, 2 vCPUs) Aurora instance. I suspect both of these options would have done the job for us, and maybe not have suffered from the same cold start problems as our serverless database, but after 3 migrations, it’s probably time to get back to doing some feature work!


#databases #postgres #aws

Learn from memes is a working strategy!

Therefore, I’d like to share with you this article (quite a long one) that describes a Postgres meme.

So, you could learn its concept broken down by a “level of depths”.

#databases #postgres

​​The beginning a month is the time when you topically get charged for your subscriptions.

So, I am once again asking you to enroll in a monthly subscription to the Come Back Alive foundation.

#donations #Ukraine

A couple of days ago I got together with amazing people to record an episode of the DeadOps Show (in Ukrainian).

Initially we wanted to talk about the hero culture but somehow the conversation slipped into the topic of burnouts.

So here you are. Yet another episode about the thing that never gets old.

#podcast

Death by a thousand microservices.

You can consider it to be yet another “old tech guy yells at cloud” article, but it has ratio in it.

Yet, I wouldn’t say that we have to throw away the whole idea of distributed systems. Distributed systems is the reason why I still have a job!

So, I would rather read this piece as a “memento mori” article, a reminder that we have to take things in moderation.

For example, there’s an idea of having a “trunk” monolith supported by a handful of additional smaller services. I know a company that does just that and you know what? They’re fine!

#friday #culture

O’Reilly is being on a streak now!

Right after the Software Architecture book bundle, we’ve got the Cybersecurity Month bundle!

As usual, you can pay different amount of money to unlock different number of books. But still, the whole amount is probably less than the individual price for some of the titles.

#books #humblebundle

​​For today’s Donations Monday I would like to remind you about Pavlo and Naya, who raise funds for AFU since the start of the full-scale invasion. Their this week’s goal is 310974 UAH .

- Pavlo’s requisites
- Naya’s requisites

#donations #Ukraine

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

#digest #newsletter

If you want to know what an IDP (Internal Developer Portal) is, but at this point you are too afraid to ask; this article is for you!

It goes through some core features of an IDP and describes why those exist and how can one benefit from them.

Yes, I must admit that this is a marketing article and eventually they will try to sell you their service. However, you don’t have to buy anything to read it!

#idp

Some time ago, there was a story of a programmer who held the entire Ukrainian customs service as a hostage, because he was the only one familiar with the obscure codebase (that he has created himself).

Unfortunately, this is not a single case over the industry. When a Programmer Holds the Code Hostage tells a similar story that, frankly, could happen at any company.

What are the takeaways? Appeasement doesn't work. It takes some courage and will from the management to identify and successfully address the situation. There are even some tips on how to do it in the end.

#culture

​​"Winter is coming" as the House of Stark used to put it.

Yet, we can prepare ourselves. The Come Back Alive foundation together with Nova Posta are running the "Protect the Sky" fundraiser.

The goal is to raise 330M UAH (8,9M USD) for Air Defense and mobile command posts.

About the half of the goal is reached.

#donations #Ukraine

At last! A new episode of the CatOps Voice chat (in Ukrainian) is here!

This time we spoke about pet-projects as well as marketing of the open source technologies.

As a bonus you can learn what ML and wine have in common 😉

You can listen to this episode on:

- YouTube
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts (the episode hasn’t appeared there yet for some reason)
- Google Podcasts
- Substack

Enjoy!

#говорилка