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ryanfitzon Ask HN: Simplest way to create a very basic data driven website these days?

I would look into AWS Lambda. Lambda host backend functions written in javascript, python or java. You can then use the AWS javascript sdk in your frontend code to invoke these lambda functions. This will be very low cost and cuts out a lot of boilerplate work. You pay on a per request basis versus an hourly or monthly basis. So if no one is using your website, then you pay nothing.

ryanfitzon XDSD has an apparent 80% fail rate – so why is it being pushed as the new Agile?

I believe its not an 80% project fail rate, but rather 80-85% of the programmers working this way quit.

ryanfitzon Open-sourcing Teletraan, a code deployment system

We use Teletraan heavily. Currently we have about 500 deploys per day, including the auto deploys.

Slightly off topic, I'm a big fan of continuous deployments, but 500 deployments a day seems excessive. Assuming an 8 hour work day, thats more than 1 deploy every minute. Its great that this system works that seamlessly, but are there really benefits with deploying that frequently?

ryanfitzon Update on 1/28 service outage

Github was hosted at rackspace, here is there blogpost about it https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace

From their blog posted last month:

As we started transitioning hosts and services to our own data center, we quickly realized we'd also need an efficient process for installing and configuring operating systems on this new hardware.

ryanfitzon Update on 1/28 service outage

I recently read a blog post from Github about them operating their own datacenter http://githubengineering.com/githubs-metal-cloud/

Im not positive, but it sounds like a fairly recent switch from a cloud provider to their own datacenter. If thats the case, Id expect a number of outages to come in the following months.

ryanfitzon Google Fired Me

You were probably already "gone" once HR contacted you in June. HR's job is to protect the company, at no point were they concerned with improving your work relationship with the other employee. However, they were concerned with making sure you couldn't sue Google for wrongful termination. They gave you 6 months notice, followed up with you a few times, tied up any lose ends and then let you go.

While I do think you were already gone, it sounds like you handled things horribly during this 6 month period. You should have cut off all contact with the other person and started job hunting.

ryanfitzon Ask HN: What non-computer activities do you do?

I do a good bit of weight lifting, typically 4 or 5 times a week. I find it a great way to disconnect and focus on something very simple / straightforward for an hour. Its also a great way to relieve stress.

ryanfitzon Ask HN: Should I fret my GitHub activity when job hunting?

I think you're over thinking things. Tech hiring is so random that you could have the most impressive list of projects on github, but if you get asked a single data structure question that you stumble on they might pass. Similarly, you could ace the white boarding questions, but if they check out a project of yours on github that they don't enjoy for some reason they might pass.

I would stick to doing whatever will give you the most confidence when talking to companies. If that is studying data structures/algorithms then keep doing that. If its launching a side project focus on that instead.

ryanfitzon Transformation at Yahoo Foiled by Its Leader’s Inability to Bet the Farm

I bet if she scanned the work from office people she would also find people who just don't work.

ryanfitzon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2015)

Location: New York, NY

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, node.js, iOS, Swift, Objective-C, RESTful apis, angularjs, ansible, docker, extensive AWS experiences

Resume: https://s3.amazonaws.com/fitz-docs/resume/rf-resume.pdf

email: ryan.fitz1@gmail.com

github: https://github.com/ryanfitz

twitter: https://twitter.com/theRyanFitz

Hey I'm Ryan. Im a tech lead, full stack developer and Techstars graduate. I’ve built and launched multiple iOS apps which have been featured in the App Store. I have extensive experience building highly available, scalable and cost effective systems on AWS.

ryanfitzon AWS US East is experiencing high error rates on several services

I've been using DynamoDB since it was released. In over 3 and 1/2 years of use, this is the first time I've experienced DynamoDB being down.

ryanfitzon How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

Other than ec2, what AWS services were you using and how did you migrate those? At minimum, I'd guess you were using elb for load balancing, sqs for queues and elastic cache for redis.

ryanfitzon My Amazon S3 Mistake

When I setup an AWS account for pet projects the very first thing I do is create a billing alarm that alerts me the second my bill goes above $0. This way if something is accidentally running without my knowledge, ill get an alert (email / sms) and can quickly take action.

ryanfitzon My Amazon S3 Mistake

Amazon also places limits on all of its services. I would think one of the reasons for these default limits is to help with cases of abuse. You can learn more about them at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_lim...

ryanfitzon Hologram: taking EC2 Instance Roles everywhere

Didn't mean to imply no need for Hologram or not to keep dev as close as possible to production. However, I do think you should be doing this before looking into a solution like hologram. I've seen many startups that run all their environments on a single account and eventually something bad happens knocking production offline. If you were to use hologram, but still only a single AWS account you could still just as easily kill production.

ryanfitzon Hologram: taking EC2 Instance Roles everywhere

For working with AWS apis, securing access keys, and granting least privilege, the first step to take is to make completely separate AWS accounts per environment. Make a Bigco-Prod, Bigco-Test, Bigco-Dev AWS accounts. Developers only access the Development account, so even if they connect with a highly privileged key / role and a bug wipes out your services, only the Dev account is effected and production keeps on humming. AWS makes this extremely easy to do, they offer consolidated billing to pay one bill for multiple accounts. Takes no more than 30 min to set this all up and I would recommend this for even a company with just 1 developer.

ryanfitzon AWS CodeDeploy

I've only briefly read over the documentation, but this service seems to not follow deployment best practices that aws and others such as netflix have been talking about for years. Specifically the pattern of pre-baking an ami with your current version of the app you are deploying and any other needed software completely installed on the ami and then having an autoscale group be able to boot that ami up in a few seconds and start working. This greatly helps with scaling up, doing rolling upgrades and also very easy rollbacks.

The CodeDeploy service seems to operate by you manually launching base ec2 instance with a code deploy agent and then this agent will checkout your git code on the live instance, run any provisioning steps and then if things break somehow rollback all that work, still on the live instance.

I'm sure this is still a big improvement to companies who are manually sshing into servers and running deployments by hand, but as someone who pre-bakes ami's and does rolling upgrades with autoscaling groups this service seems like a step backwards.

ryanfitzon How We Use AWS, Ansible, and Packer to Make Deployment Awesome

I have a very similar setup as the one mentioned in the article where we create a full baked ami, then create a new autoscaling group which attaches itself with a load balancer.

The reason you want a fully created ami is to greatly cut down on the time it takes to accept new traffic. Lets say you get a spike in traffic, if you have a fully baked ami your autoscaling group can get an alert of the increase in traffic, launch a new instance and that instance will start handling traffic around 60 or so seconds. If you booted a generic ami and then provisioned the box you could easily be looking at 10's of minutes before it could handle traffic depending on the complexity of your app. This could easily lead towards long periods of down time.

ryanfitzon DocumentDB

I've been using DynamoDB since it was released. I wrote a nodejs driver[1] and a nodejs data mapper for it[2], so I have a decent bit of experience with it. Browsing the DocumentDB docs the two services seem to be very different. DynamoDB is really just a key value store with some very nice properties, but also a lot of tradeoffs. One such tradeoff is querying data is very limited in DynamoDB. In Dynamo you can only query data by its primary hash key and optional range key. These keys you must specify upfront when you create your table and cannot be changed afterwards.

DocumentDB seems much more similar to mongodb and appears to have a very flexible query ability. In my opinion, one of the best features with DynamoDB is you can tune the number of reads/writes each individual table requires. This lets you scale up and down your database and greatly helps keep costs down. This is a feature that only a hosted database service can offer. I haven't yet read any pricing info on DocumentDB, but hopefully they offer a similar feature as this is really where a hosted database service can shine.

[1]https://github.com/Wantworthy/dynode [2]https://github.com/ryanfitz/vogels

ryanfitzon TDD your API

I recently created a login flow for a RESTful API. The solution I went with was instead of thinking of it as a high level activity such as login, what I was really doing was creating auth tokens to then be used in the Authorization header in subsequent requests.

I created a /tokens endpoint, where I POST the auth credentials and in return I get back a newly generated auth token. In my opinion this is a nice RESTFul solution.

ryanfitzon Ask HN: Do you use AWS autoscaling with fully baked AMIs?

I bake ami using both packer and ansible and then do blue/green deployments using asgard from netflix. Asgard streamlines the whole process of creating a new autoscaling group, ramp up new instances and then cut of live traffic to the older instances. They also expose a simple http api to fully automate deploys.

I have been doing continuous deployments baking ami's with asgard for a couple of years now and have had great results.

ryanfitzon Ask HN: So what's the job market like for generalists, really?

About 50% were through my personal network, the rest came from various online sources. Angellist worked really well for me, I highly recommend trying them if you're looking for early stage startups. Linkedin was overloaded with recruiters, I got little use from it.

ryanfitzon Ask HN: So what's the job market like for generalists, really?

I can only speak for NYC, but its very hot. A couple of months ago my startup failed and I was looking for a job. I was only interested in early stage startups and wanted to work on every part of the tech stack (frontend, backend, devops....). In the span of 2 weeks I met with over 2 dozen startups and received a number of great offers.

ryanfitzon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2013)

SEEKING WORK - NYC / REMOTE

Fullstack developer with 10 years of experience. Worked with many startups, having launched products both on the web and mobile (ios).

Specialties: Highly scalable and reliable applications (powered by AWS), distributed systems, RESTful apis, service oriented architecture, JavaScript, node.js, objective-c, backbone.js, AngularJS, jQuery, DevOps, puppet, redis, DynamoDB, postgresql, elasticsearch, AWS, project management

* Github: https://github.com/ryanfitz

* LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ryan-fitzgerald/3/8a8/a82

ryanfitzon Announcing the Netflix Cloud Prize

Thats great to hear the ami bakery is finally getting open sourced. I wrote my own ami bakery and it has completely changed the way we do releases at my startup. I'm Looking forward to hacking on this for the contest.

ryanfitzon Ask HN: Startups on EC2, what does your setup look like?

Recently, I switched to pre-baking AMIs and then launching those images with auto scaling groups. This has simplified and sped up our deploys substantially (and reduced our costs), we can go from code commit to deployed on production in about 90 seconds.

Netflix has talked about a similar approach. The basic process is to have volumes from existing AMIs already mounted to your buildbox. Then when you kick off a build it checks out your code, compiles and installs it on one of those volumes, runs puppet in a chroot on the volume to do any needed configuration. Finally you unmount the volume and create a fully bootable AMI. I scripted this up in python and the baking process takes around 60 seconds.

ryanfitzon Ask HN - Do you use hunger for productivity? (Life Hacking)

Look into intermittent fasting diets. They go by various names leangains, renegade, warrior diet, but all follow the same principles of 12 - 20hours of fasting and then a small eating window at night to get in all your nutrition. I've been doing various forms of intermittent fasting for about 3 years with great results. During the workday, which is the middle of your fast, I experience lots of energy and great focus.

ryanfitzon Divshot

This would be great if it could also generate javascript code to run the app (backbone.js, angular...) then you could plug that into calling your backend.

ryanfitzon Cube: 3D home printer starts shipping in days

I liked the design of their pages so I went to look at the source and noticed every page is wrapped in a top level form tag, can someone explain why they would do this?

ryanfitzon Using jQuery, Plugins and UI Controls With Backbone

quickly looking at the bootstrap javascript they are making calls to $().offset which also doesn't work for hidden elements, so yes were talking about the same thing.