Tony Metzidis

Testing alerting in Google Cloud Monitoring requires a proactive approach, especially with uncommon scenarios.

This approach moves away from the “one big distro” model, which often leads to 100GB+ VHDX files and dependency hell.

In our pursuit of a minimalist, high-performance development environment, we recently moved our primary local operations to a custom Alpine Linux footprint.

Github has suffered reliability issues as of late, due to 10x commit volume from vibe coding, leading many seeking other providers or self hosting their own git repositories.

For engineers running lean environments on WSL 2, every megabyte of RAM and every CPU cycle counts.

I’ve been having Windows Update failures (I’m on Windows Insider Beta Channel) on my SER 6 Max for about a year.

Security auditing in the cloud often devolves into an exercise in “alert fatigue.”

As systems grow, the “one repo per microservice” pattern can lead to significant overhead: dependency hell, fragmented CI/CD, and difficulty in cross-service refactoring.

Managing dotfiles on Windows can be a challenge if you want to keep your home directory clean without relying on symlinks or complex management tools.

The two common patterns to forking a module are (1) forking via a separate repo or (2) vendoring, which forks all deps into the current module (or app).

When migrating to GCP from AWS some features are front-and-center – like projects & folders.

Recording /etc/ config in git is a recommended way to track history and revert breaking changes.

Teams should consider many qualities when choosing a cloud provider like AWS, GCP (Google Cloud Platform) or Microsoft Azure.

Client CLIs & SDKs for GCP, Firebase and other clouds are terribly bloated.

WSL2 provides great disk performance, but it requires storing the files separately in a virtual disk that is not accessible by OneDrive.

With the news that AWS will be now charging about $4 / instance-month for public IPv4 addresses, many developers who procrastinated ipv6 migration are finally updating both ends of their development setup.

I recently set up a new SER6 and reviewed bloatware / spyware / malware prior to connecting to the internet.

By default, all Windows drives are mounted with read & write access (rw) within WSL .

Smokeping is a self-contained network monitoring app , capable of monitoring using ICMP/Ping, HTTP, DNS – as well as other signals generated from CLI monitoring tools (e.g. curl, dig, mtr etc).

Every app has that last inch (or mile) of code that’s not covered by tests.

Recently an old friend, with great experience as an IC, PM and EM, called me to ask for some advice.

One responsibility of engineers & especially leads is managing many channels of signals : emails, blog posts (internal and external), tags , push notifications, group chats, alerts from dashboards and more.

Directory layouts are like log cabins that start from a basic shed, gradually adding a room at a time.

Cloud instances bill by the hour (or the minute) – and right now you’re burning money.

I work from about 7 different machines, including 3 laptops, ipad, chromebook and a PC desktop.

📓 The Gist You may think your 100mB Alpine images are small–but how about 100kB?

In Part 1, we completed our development environment, including setting up Hugo and our repo.

Here’s a benchmark comparing pi-hole running on a Pi Zero (with USB ethernet) vs a Pi 3b+. tl;dr There was negligible performance difference for blocked domains, but a measurable difference in mean for forwarded + cacheable domains.

Here’s the fastest way to get your PHP app running.

Next time you create a post with code snippets–like here on dev.to or stackoverflow–consider sharing a working and buildable gist along with it.

There was a great discussion a year ago about how fast gnu’s version of “yes” is.

GCP resources are organized into projects – all resource IDs and IAM principles are grouped under a project ID.

Static site frameworks like Hugo allow you to manage content with Markdown and publish content via scalable hosting platforms like Firebase hosting.

Instrumentation is a critical part of any application.

Blink security cameras are an affordable home security camera system.

Like me, you’re probably more comfortable on a CLI.

Usually setting up the build dependencies is a major part of each build job.

A common migration pattern when moving to docker includes running some systems (e.g. dev, staging or a prod canary) on your docker image while the production app is still running your traditional tgz artifacts (e.g. your node app with node_modules) Let’s…

Google App Script is a little-known, yet powerful development platform for enhancing and automating google services.

2016 may be the year of free SSL, and AWS ACM (AWS Certificate Manager) is a great offering for Cloudfront & ELB users (most web apps).

Varnish is an amazing platform – it can easily help you handle 100x traffic and is easy to add to your existing frontend or API layer with little to no change to your app.

AWS announced recently that it’s EC2 Container Registry (ECR) is now available.

We all know that no ports should be open to the internet for development purposes, but for convenience it’s common to find a security group with port 22 (SSH) open to 0.0.0.0/0 .

It’s hard to strike the right balance with admin rights–either the rights are too strict and people can’t get work done or they’re too lenient and you have security issues.

Often your creative team will produce master videos in 4k or 1080p, but you need to downcode these videos into 720p/1080p for web broadcasting.

By default Wordpress uses it’s own pseudo-cron which triggers with every request.

Redirects can account for a significant share of direct traffic so taking a few minutes to optimize them is worthwhile.

Continuing the relentless quest to keep my phone speedy, I stumbled upon a developer tool that is useful to anyone needing to troubleshoot a slow, short-living or overheating phone – Battery Historian Battery Historian Battery Historian shows you a much m…

I have a frustrating relationship with my phone’s performance.

I was desperate to try Hangouts 4.0 for Android, but suspicious of side-loading.