Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
Warning: this is a bit of a rant. Today my team had to migrate our ElasticSearch cluster from one set of instances in our EC2 VPC, to a smaller set of physical machines in our regular datacenter (yes, it's actually cheaper). Both sets of machines/instances are Chef-controlled, which generally I don't have to worry about, but in this case it was important due to the ordering of steps in the…
Disclaimer: I'm not what I would call a "hard-core" Chef user, but I'll explain in a moment why that is irrelevant.
I've been working on and off with Chef for almost a year and a half now; certainly not something I use every day or even every week but perhaps a handful of times per month something will come up that requires me to jump into Chef land and get some real work done. There are…
A couple of things of note have happened recently. Firstly, I managed to conquer the #10-level Currywurst at Curry & Chili, rated at a (literally) eye-watering 7.7 million Scovilles - not a performance I care to repeat. Secondly, I recently changed employer from Nokia to SoundCloud. This is a big change for me, and in some ways hard since it was working with Nokia that allowed me to anchor here in…