A background job should be a function. So, putting more things in it is always a good idea! Sean announced that he shipped background jobs for crates.io. It's been in production for more than two weeks, and no issues have been reported. It's made life much easier because he no longer needs to spend time manually cleaning or cloning the index before…

Do you use Git practically every day, but have no idea how to implement it? Need a more accessible and easier way than reading original source code to understand how it works? Want to know how to rebuild Git in a high-level language to learn the concepts involved? Sam talks to James Coglan, who wrote the book, Building Git. It teaches readers how t…

Sean and Sam talk about debugging a memory leak with Crates.io when upgrading to Rust 1.32 that could only be reproduced in production. The problem was related to the jemalloc memory allocator being used in the newer version of Rust. Such an issue causes an impact, regardless of the language being used. Many memory allocators exist, but you’re usua…

Derek Prior, engineering manager at GitHub, joins Sam to talk about what they’ve been working on these days. Derek’s doing GitHub projects that can’t talk about. But, he did mention that GitHub recently shipped small-scope changes to its issue templates. Sam dives deep into details about building a Ruby auto formatter and not wanting to be the sole…

Ruby's language development is off the charts. Also: we talk about programming. Sam and Sean discuss Ruby, auto-formatting, and whether Hash Rockets are good. They bring other languages, such as Go, Rust, and Elixir, into their formatting discussion. Also, Sam shares some work-related news. He’s leaving his job at DigitalOcean. Before he goes, he w…

We’re still time travelling, Sam has since left DigitalOcean, but in this episode, he talks about his experiences there. Sean talks about his experiences managing the crates.io team, and incidents on an open source project with volunteer time. Sam talks about his experiences scaling go programs, and processes vs threads, as well as why kubernetes m…

Yak Shave - Episode 8 This episode was recorded on October 21st 2018. We thought it best to get this to you, even though it's a little stale :) Remember that dark, scary time in October 2018 when GitHub went down? Sean is joined by Derek once again to discuss what they've been up to. Sean not only experienced frustration with GitHub’s downtime, but…

Sean and Sam talk all about testing. Sam created an ideal testing pyramid based on personal experience and from talking with test thought leaders, such as Justin Searls. The testing pyramid has “integrated” at the top, and “isolated/unit” at the bottom, along with a wide base and X axis for the number of tests you should be writing. Write as few in…

This week Sean is joined by former cohost Derek Prior. After a brief reflection on the end of The Bike Shed, we discuss WebAssembly and what it means for the future of the web as well as native sandboxing. Finally, we catch up on what Derek has been doing since leaving The Bike Shed. Corrections from this episode: Emscripten and the LLVM backend we…

In this episode, Sean and Sam discuss the challenges of feedback cycles in organizations, how we could benefit from more feedback in open source, and some idiosyncrasies regarding libcurl and the HTTP/1.1 specification. crates.io's (WIP) background processing Specification of the Accept-Encoding header (you SHOULD NOT send gzip if it's not included…

In this episode of The Yak Shave, Sean gets Sam's opinion on dealing with documentation. They share tips, tricks, and workarounds regarding queryable structures, databases, APIs, languages, documentation, and more to address these users. Then, Sean offers Sam advice on how to debug a Ruby issue surrounding database CPU usage. Shopify Careers Diesel…

In this episode of The Yak Shave, Sean shares the most nightmarish debugging experience he has had in a long time. rails_fast_attributes was down to one failure, which manifested itself as a test where a query was expected to run 269 times, but only ran 265 times. After testing, troubleshooting, and finding the root cause, he determined that it was…

In this episode of The Yak Shave, Sean and Sam discuss their experiences with incident management, the difficulties of getting an on-call rotation right. DigitalOcean's status page DigitalOcean product documentation on Droplets Google Site Reliability Engineering book DigitalOcean's rebuild vs. restore On-the-fly composition of dashboards using Gra…

The despacito music video. A video of Sean trying to get Ruby saying despacito The bikeshed: Sean's previous podcast. Crates.io: the package registry for Rust and Cargo the rust package manager Carol and Ashley on twitter. AWS S3 and "Read Your Writes" consistency A good primer on Eventual Consistency, and separately, a good primer on "read your wr…