Author: Josh Sherman
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Quitting Caffeine
Caffeine, the performance enhancing drug of choice of programmers, gamers and just about everyone else in America and abroad. I used to worship the molecule just like the next coder, and why not? Code longer, focus better and hell, it’s cheaper than most party favors! Hi, I’m Josh and up…
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How I use Redis
If you know me you know that I’m a huge proponent of Redis. I started using it in mid-2011 as the storage engine for a chat system I was building for SceneKids. Over the last year and a half or so I’ve utilized Redis more and more for many other…
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PHP: Built for the web
If you know me, you know I’m a pretty devout PHP coder when it comes to my own adventures in web development. I’ve been using it since version 3 (started with it in Y2K) and in using it that long, I’d be the last person to say that it’s a…
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Blocking Proxy Sites with JavaScript
Social websites don’t always attract the most desireable patrons and often times those users opt to hide their identity (as well as blocking banner ads) behind a proxy server. There are quite a few free web-based proxies out there (generally ad funded, some have premium tiers) and they typically have…
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Going Vanilla with MySQL
Over the last few years I’ve gotten down and dirty with MySQL’s config file, my.cnf. I read and re-read the MySQL documentation as well as any blog posts I could find on the subject. I was able to keep my connections low with caching and fought against the InnoDB buffer…
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The Accidental MVP
Over the last 10 years I’ve been a single digit employee at two startups in the Tampa area and both companies had completely different approaches to product development. At The Online Outpost we build an inventory management and listing platform for eBay consignment shops (remember those?!). The product was originally…
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Node.js for Web Apps? Not so much.
I’m sure I’ll catch some flak for this from the Node.js community (which does seem to be thriving) but I’m just not seeing Node.js as a viable platform for building web applications. When I say web application, I specifically mean websites. The platform seems great for building small servers and…
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How a kindergarten teacher impacted my life
If I were writing this at the time, it probably would have been more of a diatribe than an insightful look at how someone shaped my life. The year was 1986 and I had just finished up a short stint in Catholic school for pre-school. Kindergarten was quite a culture…
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Lessons learned about directory based sharding
“Too many files?” is what I said in disbelief when I was having issues restoring a Linode backup a while back. I was sitting on over 10 million files after I had moved a metric shit ton of data from MySQL to disk and restructured the data structure for the…
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Getting real IP addresses using NodeBalancer and Nginx
This one’s pretty simple, but it’s not documented by Linode and most of the sites I found on Google were people ranting about a lack of documentation but failing to provide their solution. The situation is this, I’m running sites behind a Linode NodeBalancer and I want the user’s real…