Charlie Robbins indexzero

GitHub and Congress

My 5-minute "flash talk" for the House of Representatives' 2014 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference.

Intro slide

1 minute

Introduction
Can't not talk about GitHub

monitoring: what I want

I've recently shifted from a straight engineering job to a job with a "dev/ops" title. What I have discovered in operations land depresses me. The shoemaker's children are going unshod. Operations software is terrible.

What's driving me craziest right now is my monitoring system.

what I have right now

What I have right now is Nagios.

A D3 recreation of David Taylor's visualization The meteoric rise of boys' names ending in 'n'.

The chart shows the number of children born with names ending in each letter. Adjust the slider to change the year. Toggle the checkboxes to show boys, girls, or both.

simple 4mb buffer proxy benchmarks

the goal: to do fast virtual host routing, e.g. to have a single process on a machine listening on port 80 and proxying data based on HTTP Host to other non-port-80 web processes on the same machine

many people use nginx for this because nginx is faster than node is currently for data-heavy applications (see below)

about these benchmarks

they use the JS proxies from https://github.com/substack/bouncy/tree/master/bench

Better local require() paths for Node.js

Problem

When the directory structure of your Node.js application (not library!) has some depth, you end up with a lot of annoying relative paths in your require calls like:

const Article = require('../../../../app/models/article');

Those suck for maintenance and they're ugly.

Possible solutions

Overview

Testing out fedor's SSL enhancements. You don't notice the difference... At first!

Once you adjust ciphers to disable ECDH, then you get the nice surprise.

Test Description

Running an http server that acts as a proxy to an SSL server, all running on localhost.

npm-registry-client: https://github.com/isaacs/npm-registry-client (handles the cli -> couchdb stuff)
npmlog: https://github.com/isaacs/npmlog (npm's logger utility)
read-package-json: https://github.com/isaacs/read-package-json (what npm uses to read your package.json files)
read-installed: https://github.com/isaacs/read-installed (Reads a folder and returns a dependency tree)
init-package-json: https://github.com/isaacs/init-package-json (What npm uses to create a package.json when you run npm init)
npmconf: https://github.com/isaacs/npmconf (What npm uses to manage its configuration, including a list of defaults)
nopt: https://github.com/isaacs/nopt (what npm uses for option parsing)

build

Clone and build Node for analysis:

$ git clone https://github.com/joyent/node.git
$ cd node
$ export GYP_DEFINES="v8_enable_disassembler=1"
$ ./configure
$ make -j4

	if (req.url~ "^/[^/]+/-/[^/]+\.tgz") {
	set req.url = regsub(req.url, "^/([^/]+)/-/([^/]+\.tgz)", "/isaacs/public/npm/$1/_attachments/$2");
	} else {
	set req.url = "/isaacs/public/npm/" req.url "/doc.json";
	}