BitRot | 2016 in review

2016 in review

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This is a post of accomplishments from 2016, gathered throughout the year. Some of these will be vague, some quite verbose. I’ll include links to what I can.

2015Q4:

  • Wrote a structured logging mechanism for python with 50us performance (writing to a ring buffer drained in a worker thread).

Q1:

  • Wrote a scheduler thread in python with correct semantics for preemption and thread pool for running tasks. This is more difficult than it sounds, especially when you start to deal with all the finer points around task preemption.
  • Discovered that most libBLAS implementations give different results. ATLAS in particular will give different results based on how it was compiled.
  • Figured out how to scale elasticsearch in docker containers.
  • Built a password wallet that syncs cleanly over any naive sync program (actually exposes a encrypted key-value store backed by the filesystem, so this is much more generic).
  • Built a strategy for running Mongo inside Docker and persisting only some of its dbs to tmpfs.

Q2:

  • Started using tmux professionally.
  • Caught a clock drift bug. We were lucky, and it was only off by 15 minutes.
  • Polished my bash files to assign color prompts based on a hash of the user/hostname.
  • Migrated an older (~20k commit) svn repository to git.
  • Improved the simulator at work to be more accurate by 2 orders of magnitude.
  • Used ipv6 for the first time.

Q3:

  • Deployed our trading system to run across 2 physical servers. This is a bigger deal than it seems.
  • Designed and built my own invoicing/billing system from scratch.
  • Wrote a priority executor for Python, which executes tasks favoring those with a higher priority first (priority = time we need it done by).
  • Wrote an SSH CA script.
  • Wrote an ACME-style CA script for SSH.

Q4:

  • Pushed back incorporation of my side business until next year because I didn’t focus enough on it (not a good thing, but worth mentioning).
  • Began brewing mead again (Finished after 6 weeks at 11% ABV….tastes good). A few weeks later, I discovered that it tastes much better if I filter it with cheesecloth, to remove yeast sediment.
  • Began my MSc in Computer Science, at my BA alma mater: The Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya.
  • Wrote a git-surgery script to automatically clear out corrupted objects and recover them from a configured remote. Useful if you have a server with bad hardware, but no budget to replace it.
  • Wrote a pipe to bash install script for my bashfiles.