Brian Donohue | Pinterest engineering manager, Product Engineering About 100 days ago, our product engineering team began experimenting with a three-day no-meeting schedule for individual contributors on our teams. It’s not a big revelation that software development requires long stretches of uninterrupted time to focus. As Pinterest has grown, we’ve noticed the number of meetings also has increas

Today, Solo.io is pleased to announce a new open source project, the Envoy Operator. The Envoy Operator is a tool designed to simplify deploying, scaling, and managing Envoy instances inside of Kubernetes. This operator was made possible thanks to the folks at CoreOS who just open-sourced the incredibly useful Operator SDK, which we used to build the Envoy Operator. Through our work on Gloo, Solo.

TL;DR seiri is a lightweight music manager written (mostly) in Rust that helps keep huge music libraries organized. Try it today at chyyran.moe/seiri. A couple of years ago, I uninstalled iTunes. Once upon a time, I had a (now ancient) iPod touch, and a huge collection of MP3 files. Even back then iTunes would slow to a crawl trying to sync even a thousand songs, and eventually my library outgrew

One of the most interesting parts of Google is our fleet-wide continuous profiling service. We can see who is accountable for CPU and memory usage, we can continuously monitor our production services for contention and blocking profiles, and we can generate analysis and reports and easily can tell what are some highly impactful optimization projects we can work on. I briefly worked on Google Cloud

Like many software engineers, I come from the world of enterprise software development. In this world design patterns and software architecture are king. I’ve spent countless hours studying the principals of SOA, Domain Driven Design, CQRS and all the wonderful enterprise architecture patterns laid out for us by Martin Fowler. One pattern that always struck me as both fascinating and fundamentally

A couple of months ago I did a performance comparison between some of the top free DNS Resolvers available. It was just after Quad9 had launched and I was trying to decide which one to use and recommend to families and friends. Google, OpenDNS, Quad9, .. some many options… I love options … And things just got better. CloudFlare, one of the companies that know the most about Internet performance re

Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production — http://principlesofchaos.org/. Initiated by Netflix, this discipline follows the track of Chaos Monkey and their Simian Army and grows up to a new level. However, even if the concept is more and more present in our co

Google Cloud Build (f.k.a Container Builder) was announced last month and I have been using it ever since. It has a few features that I really love that have gone unhighlighted. I wrote a testimony on Hacker News when it came out, so I am going to elaborate on that here. Here’s a short list of the cool features: If you distribute your apps as containers, you don’t need to host a Jenkins instance o

Let’s start with quiz comparing two programs which differ only by single statement. Program C uses constant declaration (source code):

I used to spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about how to begin writing a test. A deconstructed ship — Deutsches Technikmuseum, BerlinI googled test patterns in Go.Many people seem to rely on external dependencies for assertions. And in fact, I understand that generic (aha!) functions like isNil(v interface{}) bool can initially bring some speed to the development. But in the long run,

We’re excited to announce Coinbase Commerce, available today for merchants around the world. Merchants everywhere can use Coinbase Commerce to accept Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin payments. What is Coinbase Commerce?Coinbase Commerce is a new service that enables merchants to accept multiple cryptocurrencies directly into a user-controlled wallet. Our mission at Coinbase is to creat

You can now develop your AWS Lambda function code using Go. Lambda lets you run code without provisioning and managing… Since I played with Go for an IoT hackathon last year I’ve been looking for more opportunities to keep using it. Go is fast, with a really low memory footprint and with the benefits of strongly typed languages, making it perfect for Serverless apps.

I had an integration test that was very complex (most are, sadly) and took too long to start. I was able to diagnose why using new features of Go’s 1.10 trace tool. This post describes my workflow and what led me there. The example code I’m using for this post is at https://github.com/cep21/trace-110. My integration test was a bit more complex, but generally had startup that was slow due to a sing

TL;DR Considering Kubernetes to automate the setup and management of blockchain networks? This is part 1 of a multi-part blog series explaining why its a good idea and how it can be done Happenstance brought me in front of an enthusiastic, spirited, and ambitious duo of entrepreneurs who were running a fast-moving blockchain startup. Plagued by operations and latency woes, their search for relief

It’s not a microservices platform if there’s only one service. And all those services need to be able to talk to each other, they need to cope when some of them are not feeling well, they need to run on real machines, they need to be able to connect with the outside world and so much more besides. This is where Kubernetes comes in — it orchestrates the life and times of individual Docker container