Paco Guzmán pacoguzman

My job, explained so my mom can understand it

"I am a freelance Ruby and Rails developer". When I talk with my geek friends, everyone understands what I do and they have a reasonable understanding of how I spend my day. But sometimes, less technical people ask me what I do for a living and then I tend to dumb down the answer: "I am a programmer, I usually build websites.". Oh -they say- my nephew also make websites, he even built me a blog in Blogger.

Err... yes, but that hardly has anything to do with what I do for a living.

There are many different kinds of websites, built with different technologies, and depending on the site and the technology used to build it, they are made by one kind of professional or another. The craft of building a website comprises many different disciplines, and professionals usually specialize in just one part of the process. Although I do many different things, my specialization is mainly programming dynamic websites using Ruby and Rails.

In this article I want to

This is how I debug SystemStackError when there is no stack trace.

My first attempt was:

begin
  a_method_that_causes_infinite_recursion_in_a_not_obvious_way
rescue SystemStackError
  puts caller
end

Yesterday I upgraded our running elasticsearch cluster on a site which serves a few million search requests a day, with zero downtime. I've been asked to describe the process, hence this blogpost.

To make it more complicated, the cluster was running elasticsearch version 0.17.8 (released 6 Oct 2011) and I upgraded it to the latest 0.19.10. There have been 21 releases between those two versions, with a lot of functional changes, so I needed to be ready to roll back if necessary.

Our setup:

elasticsearch

We run elasticsearch on two biggish boxes: 16 cores plus 32GB of RAM. All indices have 1 replica, so all data is stored on both boxes (about 45GB of data). The primary data for our main indices is also stored in our database. We have a few other indices whose data is stored only in elasticsearch, but are updated once daily only. Finally, we store our sessions in elasticsearch, but active sessions are cached in memcached.

Alfredos
Madcafé
New York Burger
Homeburger
San Wich
La vaca picada

 _____

UPDATE: It's a gem!

This helper has finally been moved into a gem called nav_lynx!

https://github.com/vigetlabs/nav_lynx

http://rubygems.org/gems/nav_lynx

Thanks to @brianjlandau and @reagent for getting that set up and tested!

	curl -s -XPUT 'localhost:9200/test1' -d '{
	"mappings" : {
	"records" : {
	"properties" : {
	"coords" : {
	"type" : "nested",
	"properties" : {
	}
	}
	}

	Capybara.add_selector :record do
	xpath { \|record\| XPath.css("#" + ActionController::RecordIdentifier.dom_id(record)) }
	match { \|record\| record.is_a?(ActiveRecord::Base) }
	end

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby

	def usage
	puts "./pair [name]: pair two people"
	puts "./pair : switch to just steve"
	exit
	end

	def set_config(name, email)
	`git config user.name "#{name}"`

	Steps to install and run PostgreSQL 9.2 using Homebrew (Mac OS X)
	(if you aren't using version 9.1.5, change line 6 with the correct version)

	1. launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist
	2. mv /usr/local/var/postgres /usr/local/var/postgres91
	3. brew update
	4. brew upgrade postgresql
	5. initdb /usr/local/var/postgres -E utf8
	6. pg_upgrade -b /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.1.5/bin -B /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.2.0/bin -d /usr/local/var/postgres91 -D /usr/local/var/postgres
	7. cp /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.2.0/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/

	.DS_Store
	tmp/

Paco Guzmán pacoguzman

My job, explained so my mom can understand it

Our setup:

UPDATE: It's a gem!

Behold, the nav_link: