This year it has officially been 15 years since I started my first job as a web developer. In all these years, I never finished a degree. Since 2021, I’ve been working on a BSc in Information Systems and Information Technology from TU Dublin. The course is modular with several exit paths. One could choose …Read more

The last time I ran a road marathon was 2016. It’s been nearly 10 years since I did one of those. I tried to run the Cork marathon last year, but the timing was terrible. It was right after the end of semester exams for my BSc course and I couldn’t go out to run …Read more

In 2023, I had a modest goal of 26 books, and I managed 19. In 2024, I had a more ambitious goal of 52 books and finished 53 books. Most of my reading was a combination of e-books and audiobooks from my local library. While this isn’t all the authors, these are some of the …Read more

Learning a new programming language is rough without using it regularly. When I tried to learn Go a while ago, I struggled because I was not using it a lot. Then I my team at work started using Go and it clicked into place really well. When I decided to pick up Rust, I ran …Read more

The start line was crowded. I’d normally start a race at the back of the pack. I was chatting to Phil at Black Castle, where we awaited being called to the start line. Phil is a fast runner and a friend. I went along with him, starting further ahead than I had ever started, or …Read more

I haven’t done one of these in a while. In fact, I’ve sort of neglected my blog since the start of the pandemic. Everything got too much and I was in survival mode. I’m making conscious effort to write more and attempt to write out talks. I don’t know if I’ll submit them yet. Inching …Read more

Recently, I had a chance to think about an outage that I debugged and fixed a few years ago that involves Jenkins and systemd (or in this case lack thereof!). Generally, if you want to run a task at the end of every Jenkins job whether the job has passed or failed, you have two …Read more

We occasionally find leaks in Gluster via bugs filed by users and customers. We definitely have benefits from checking for memory leaks and address corruption ourselves. The usual way has been to run it under valgrind. With ASAN, the difference is we can compile the binary with ASAN and then anyone can run their tests …Read more

Static analysis programs are quite useful, but also prone to false positives. It’s really hard to keep track of static analysis failures on a fairly large project. We’ve looked at several approaches in the past. The one that we used to do was to publish a report every day which people could look at if …Read more

Right after Open Source Europe, we had Gluster Summit. It was a 2-day event with talks and BoFs. I had two key things to do at the Gluster Summit. One was build out the minnowboard setup to demo Tendrl. This didn’t work out. I had volunteered to help with the video work as well. According …Read more

I’ve been wanting to work on upgrading build.gluster.org setup for ages. There’s a lot about that setup that isn’t ideal in how people use Jenkins anymore. We used the unix user accounts for access to Jenkins. This means Jenkins needs to read /etc/passwd and everyone has SSH access via passwords by default. Very often, the …Read more

If you run an infrastructure, there’s a good chance you have some debt tucked in your system somewhere. There’s also a good chance that you’re not getting enough time to fix those debts. There will most likely be a good reason why something is done in the way it is. This is just how things …Read more