Blog
Performance vs. Auditability
Published: December 19, 2017
Have you ever heard anyone say this?
We turn off logging in production for performance reasons.
Maybe, it’s even something you’ve said yourself?
Over the years, I’ve heard people say many things that effectively throw auditability out the window in the name of performance. Here are just a few…
- “We turn off Apache access logs in production for improved performance”
- “We found that enabling New Relic lead to increased average response time application wide, so we decided not to use it”
- “I know you’re trying to solve a deadlock issue, but you should be careful using MySQL’s
innodb_print_all_deadlockssetting for performance reasons”
Don’t get me wrong…I’m for all prioritizing performance as a first class feature in your application. (On this blog I’ve written extensively about scalability and performance.)
But here’s the thing, while I generally support decisions made in the name of performance, I also know from first hand experience that it’s imperative that your application leave a thorough audit trail in order to solve strange and unexpected production issues.
To demonstrate this, let’s examine the implications of the a couple of the statements listed above…
HTTP Response Header Size Limits With mod_proxy_fcgi
Published: December 18, 2017
A while back I wrote a general article about HTTP response header limits. The post was written in response to an issue I was dealing with where a CDN was serving a 502 when the origin served more than 8192 bytes of headers.
Recently, I’ve been investigating yet another issue with HTTP response header size limits, this time specifically with Apache’s mod_proxy_fcgi module. Here, I’ll document my experience and findings…
Etiquette When Addressing Code Review Comments
Published: December 4, 2017
Code review etiquette is an interesting subject.
A few months back an article was published to CSS-Tricks titled “Code Review Etiquette”. It outlines some general pointers for reviewers to keep in mind when doing code reviews.
In this post, I’ll make some etiquette suggestions that apply to a more specific part of the code review process…addressing code review comments.
We’ll look at this from the perspective of both the reviewer and the contributor.
Checking If An Array Is Empty In Ruby
Published: December 3, 2017
Recently, I was working on some Ruby code where I had to check if an array is empty. It turns out there are many ways to skin this cat. Here I’ll document my learnings…
My Journey To 100
Published: November 22, 2017
This is my 100th blog post 
Rather than publishing a standard post about one of my favorite topics (such as Magento, security or caching) I’ve decided to do something special.
Here I’ll chronicle a 4 year journey starting with my very first blog post in December of 2013 leading up to the present day with my 100th blog post.
Syntax Highlighting And Color Contrast Accessibility
Published: November 16, 2017
Recently I watched a video titled “Totally Tooling Tips: Accessibility Testing” published to the Google Chrome Developers YouTube Channel.
The video demos Chrome’s built in accessibility audit tool.
After watching the video I decided to run the tool against this site.
There were a few things I needed to fix to get this site to pass the audit. One of those things was the color contrast of the syntax highlighting I use for code snippets.
In this post I’ll explore that problem and talk about my approach to solving it.