Trackstack

trackstack

Introduction Jeremy Evans is the lead developer of the Sequel database library, the Roda web toolkit, the Rodauth authentication framework, and many other Ruby libraries. He is the maintainer of Ruby ports for the OpenBSD operating system, and has contributed to CRuby and JRuby, as well as many popular Ruby libraries. We are happy to present a brand-new interview with Jeremy to our readers. Hope you enjoy it! The Interview You became a Ruby committer and received the Ruby prize 2020 with your work on keyword arguments separation. Could you tell us how did it happen, how did you feel about that? Evrone: I was overjoyed to both become a Ruby committer and to be the recipient of the RubyPrize in 2020.  In terms of how of those happened, I'll start with becoming a Ruby committer. Jeremy: I have been contributing patches and bug reports occasionally to Ruby since 2009. However, I started to get more involved with Ruby in early 2019 when hearing about the direction for keyword arguments in Ruby 3. The original proposal for keyword arguments in Ruby 3 was for full separation, so that passing a hash to a method that accepts keywords would raise an error, but also that passing keywords (a hash without braces) to a method that accept an optional hash argument would also raise an error. I thought this proposal went too far, by breaking compatibility with Ruby code that did not use keyword arguments at all. I built a patch on top of the original proposal that was more backwards compatible. I ended up presenting this proposal with Yusuke Endoh at the developer meeting at RubyKaigi 2019. While waiting on a decision from Matz about keyword arguments, I started sending in patches to fix other Ruby bugs, and after quite a few patches, Endoh-san recommended I become a committer, and Matz approved. In regards to RubyPrize, I originally was nominated in 2019 for my work on keyword arguments and general bug fixing. I was ultimately selected as a final nominee in 2019. I continued to work on general Ruby bug fixing in 2020, fixing many long standing bugs in Ruby's object model, as well as working on some important performance enhancements for keyword arguments and the generation of partial backtraces. I was again nominated for RubyPrize in 2020, and this time I was selected as the recipient. I believe this is the second time a Ruby developer has been the RubyPrize final nominee one year and recipient the following year, with Takashi Kokubun (the developer of Ruby's JIT implementation) being the RubyPrize final nominee in 2017 and winner in 2018. You are an author of Roda and Rodauth, a maintainer of Sequel and a Ruby committer. Which of your open source activities do you find the most rewarding and interesting for you right now? Evrone: This is a hard question to answer, since I find all of my open source work rewarding. However, if I have to choose, I think my work on Ruby itself is probably the most rewarding, for a few reasons. Jeremy: First, it affects the largest number of developers. While I'm happy with the popularity of the Ruby libraries I maintain, there are many more users of Ruby itself than users of the Ruby libraries I maintain. Second, working on Ruby is personally more challenging for me. In many cases, this is because it is written in C and not Ruby (for changes to core Ruby or C extensions), or because it involves parts of the Ruby standard library that I am not as familiar with. Most of the other libraries I maintain are written in pure Ruby and I'm very familiar with them, so fixing bugs in them or adding features to them is generally not as difficult. Third, it gives me a sense of accomplishment to be able to fix bugs in Ruby that have been known but unfixed for many years. That's a situation that doesn't happen in my other open source projects. Your projects have lots of tests and high test coverage. What do you think about Ruby 3 type signatures: can they help you write better software? Evrone: Unfortunately, I have to admit my ignorance in this area. I haven't used any of the static typing tools available for Ruby, and therefore I am not qualified to comment on whether they help write better software. Jeremy: I will say from my brief time reviewing the documentation for such tools, that they have limitations I think would be too restricting. I extensively use plugin systems in my libraries, and heavily use singleton classes, and last I looked there was not good general support for these in any of the available Ruby static typing tools. However, such tools may have improved since then, as this is not an area that I have followed closely. You are currently responsible for OpenBSD's Ruby ports, including JRuby and Rubinius. From your point of view, how is OpenBSD used in 2021 and what is its niche compared to Linux-based distributions? Evrone: I don't think I can speak to general OpenBSD usage. However, in terms of my personal experience, I run OpenBSD on all of my personal desktops and laptops, and for all security sensitive servers at work. From a security standpoint, I think OpenBSD is the best general purpose operating system available. I make heavy use of OpenBSD-specific security features such as pledge and unveil in my Ruby web applications. Jeremy: I also appreciate that it is very easy to administer OpenBSD systems, even more so in recent years. In my experience, using OpenBSD since 2002 both personally and professionally, OpenBSD is very stable, not just in a system-uptime sense, but also in terms of not making pointless changes. OpenBSD does not perform as well as more popular operating systems, but in my environment, I am happy to trade performance for better security and easier maintenance. How closely do you keep track of other web frameworks, auth frameworks and database toolkits? Evrone: For web frameworks, I usually look at the release notes for Rails and Hanami when they release new significant versions, mostly to see if there are new useful features I would want to add to Roda. However, I do not follow the development of either beyond that. Jeremy: I don't follow the development of other authentication frameworks at all. When I started working on Rodauth in 2015, I reviewed the frameworks available at the time to gather ideas. However, I haven't done any review since then. For database libraries, I review the ActiveRecord CHANGELOG every few months to see if there are useful features I would like to add to Sequel. Lately, I've been finding out about new significant ActiveRecord features via Twitter after they get proposed as pull requests. In a couple of recent cases, I've thought the features sounded useful and have developed implementations for Sequel. This is how the async_thread_pool database extension and column_encryption model plugin were developed. I also read the release notes for major ROM releases, though more to see how they are using Sequel instead of for ideas to improve Sequel. In recent years lots of new features landed in Ruby: pattern matching, numbered parameters, keyword arguments, type signatures, ractors, async fibers, rightward assignment and more. What are your favourites and have they affected the way you develop Ruby software? Evrone: I'm very conservative in my use of new Ruby features. Most of my libraries still support Ruby 1.9+, and my production applications run on Ruby 2.5+. I would say the newest Ruby feature I've been using in my applications that I've found quite helpful is the lonely operator, which was introduced in Ruby 2.3. Jeremy: You maintain Sequel and its ORM layer for more than 10 years. What do you think about the main challenges ORM developers face nowadays? Evrone: I'm not sure I have a good understanding of challenges that other ORM developers are facing these days. In terms of personal challenges with Sequel, the last few years have been fairly smooth and challenge free. I would say that in general, there are aspects of Sequel where the internal complexity is high and working with the related code is challenging. One of these areas is Sequel's prepared statement and bound variable support, which is because Sequel was never originally designed to support those features. Another of these areas is Sequel's advanced association support, especially support for eager loading limited associations. However, I don't think I've had significant issues in either of those areas in the last few years. Jeremy: For what use cases would you recommend Ruby developers to use Roda, Rodauth and Sequel? Where do they fit perfectly and where developers would want to choose other frameworks? Evrone: From a technical perspective, I think Roda, Rodauth, and Sequel are the best Ruby web framework, authentication framework, and database library. In all three cases, I think the performance, architecture, and flexibility are significantly better than the more popular frameworks. If the primary consideration for choosing frameworks is technical, I think Roda, Rodauth, and Sequel provide clear advantages. I think this applies regardless of the size of the application. Jeremy: However, in many cases, technical considerations may be less important than other considerations. If you compare Roda, Rodauth, and Sequel to Rails, Devise, and ActiveRecord, the Rails stack has several advantages. First, more developers know the Rails stack, so it is easier to find developers that are already familiar with it. It is going to be more challenging to find developers that are already familiar with a Roda/Sequel stack. Second, more external libraries are designed to work with the Rails stack, so it is easier to find libraries compatible with the stack. With a Roda/Sequel stack, instead of having many gems that could handle a particular need, you are likely to have just one, or possibly none in an extreme case. Third, I think the Rails stack involves less risk. This less risk manifests itself in two ways. One is, "No one ever got fired for choosing Rails", or something like that. Another is, at least for Rails and ActiveRecord, there are simply more developers actively working on the libraries. While Roda and Sequel often get high quality patches merged that were submitted by external developers, the majority of the development for both happens by me. I would like to think in my absence, due to the 100% line and branch coverage, an interested developer would be able to take over my libraries, similarly to how I took over maintenance of Sequel, but that may be optimistic. Overall, I think the choice of using a Roda/Sequel or a Rails stack mostly depends upon the relative value you place on the technical considerations versus the non-technical considerations. Recent worldwide pandemic forced developers to work from home and conferences to take place online. How did that affect your work-life balance, your projects and open source contributions? Evrone: I consider myself very lucky that the pandemic did not have a larger impact in my life.  There were a couple months where I worked remotely from home, but otherwise my job was much the same as before. I worked on the same projects and my open source contributions were not significantly affected. I do miss attending conferences in person, and look forward to the end of the pandemic so that I can start doing that again. Jeremy: Roda recently passed 1 million downloads, becoming the fourth Ruby web framework to pass that threshold. Sequel now has over 25 million downloads, and these numbers mean a lot of feedback on your open source work. What are the main technical lessons you learned from it through all these years? Evrone: I think the most important thing I've learned from my open source work is the importance of testing. Having a test suite that you can rely on is critical to confidently fix bugs and develop new features. Before I started maintaining Sequel, I did not have a good appreciation for how helpful a good test suite was. I think the main reason I was successful in taking over maintenance of Sequel was its comprehensive test suite with almost 100% line coverage, since it allowed me to easily make changes and see if those changes caused regressions elsewhere in the library. Jeremy: Your popular open-source projects and OpenBSD work expose you to alternative Ruby implementations: JRuby, MRuby, Rubinius to name a few. How popular are they and how do they affect the projects you maintain? Evrone: Testing my libraries on JRuby has been very helpful in terms of finding bugs, especially thread-safety bugs that do not occur on CRuby due to CRuby's global VM lock. I'm not sure exactly how popular JRuby is. I get a feeling that the overall percentage of Ruby web applications running on JRuby is small compared to CRuby. However, the percentage is probably significantly different if you only consider large Ruby web applications running in enterprises. Jeremy: I don't do embedded work, so I haven't had a chance to use MRuby, beyond the experience of packaging it for OpenBSD. From my limited knowledge, it's not that popular in the United States, but it is quite popular in Japan. As far as I can see, Rubinius as a project is dead. I think TruffleRuby has taken its place in the overall Ruby ecosystem. I do some CI testing of my libraries on TruffleRuby, but I'm not sure TruffleRuby runs on OpenBSD, and I haven't tried it personally. VIM has been your favourite text editor for years. Have you checked VSCode? Many developers think that it's a good modern VIM alternative that can mimic all the keyboard navigation we are used to. What’s your opinion on that? Evrone: I haven't tried VSCode. VIM still meets my needs. Truth be told, for all my years using VIM, I'm still not an advanced VIM user. However, VIM works well enough for me that I haven't bothered trying an alternative. Jeremy: Are there any plans for your future work that you could share with our readers? Evrone: My plans are fairly boring. I plan to continue to maintain the libraries I'm currently maintaining for at least 15-20 more years, and probably beyond. I also plan to continue working on Ruby itself for the same time frame, primarily focused on bug fixing. Jeremy: Web development has recently made a full circle and returned back to its roots with projects like Hotwire that render all HTML on the backend. What do you think about that "HTML-over-the-wire" and "Fullstack without JavaScript" hype? Evrone: I've been actively promoting limiting JavaScript usage to the absolute minimum for many years. Most of my applications are Web 1.0 style request-response applications with server-rendered HTML and standard HTML forms. I only use JavaScript where it is necessary. When I need something beyond request-response, in most cases my need is unidirectional (server->client), so I use MessageBus and not WebSockets. Jeremy: That's doesn't really answer the question, though. I haven't used Hotwire or a similar libraries, and when I do use JavaScript in my application to submit requests, I'm probably just as likely to use JSON as HTML. So in a certain sense, I would say I hope the trend goes even further in terms of simplicity. If you do need to use JavaScript, I don't think it makes sense to be dogmatic about JSON vs. HTML. You should pick whatever makes the most sense in that particular case. Generally if you have to replace the content of an entire element, then HTML works better, otherwise JSON can work better. It's also possible to mix the two. I have applications where I'll have a dynamic request return a response that is a JSON object that contains HTML snippets, in cases where I want to update multiple HTML elements. If you could change one thing in any of your projects or Ruby without having to care about anything, what would it be? Evrone: If I could change one thing about Ruby without having to care about anything, I'd probably start removing features, starting with refinements and Module#prepend. Both of these significantly complicate the Ruby object model and implementation. Both have been the cause of numerous bugs, and in some cases the issues they cause may not be fixable. This is a selfish answer, as I don't use either feature in my libraries or applications, but I have spent extensive time fixing the issues caused by the features. So in terms of personal use, the features are all cost and no benefit. I certainly see the advantages they offer to other projects, though. Jeremy: The conclusion We had a great talk with Jeremy and learned more about his projects & life. At Evrone, we often use Ruby to develop custom solutions for our clients. If you love it as much as we do — just send us a message via the form below, and let's have a chat! Previously published here. The author of the story is the Chief Editor at Evrone .

The First-Person Sequel and Roda Insights from the Lead Dev: an Exclusive Interview with Jeremy Evan

The input method has been the thing that makes computers usable for me. trackstick I was first introduced to them, like many, on the venerable . Their simplicity and elegance was the thing that made them great: it required less space than the trackpad, it required little movement as compared to the trackpad, and better, it had the precision and grace that I had come to expect from a refined input device. It was, like it or not, the best replacement for a mouse I had seen on a laptop. ThinkPad My second experience with them was when I had one of my own, on a Dell C600 from a scavenged laptop. It had problems, but it worked. It worked better than the terrifying trackpad that I had to modify to avoid seeing my cursor fly into the distance saying “my people need me,” thanks to terrible design decisions by Dell and Synaptics. The track stick became my hero. I replaced the nub with one from HP, who had kept them on their EliteBook series. I encountered them on a Dell later, and HP devices as well. They became the staple of a more refined keyboard, meant for those who spend their time in front of a computer and who understand it at a deeper, more fundamental level. The trackpoint was a symbol of control, of knowing, of being that which makes a professional a . This simple dot, nestled in between the g, h and b keys, became the guiding star in looking for devices which were built to a higher standard than others. professional They were built for people who care about using their computer, not just being a computer user. That diminutive dot doesn’t require firm presses, only careful gestures. It needs only the slightest of touch to really make it worth using. It must be caressed, cared for and understood. Like a car’s steering wheel or the dials of a milling machine, that tiny nub needs to be understood and given respect. Respect that too few people give it.

In defense of the eraser head

YouTube is one of the most popular social platforms that almost every one of us uses for several purposes, including learning and entertainment. Considering the rapidly increasing cyber-crime rate, almost all of us are in danger of any kind of privacy breach. However, one of the best ways to secure your data is to use a Virtual Private Network for accessing YouTube. VPN is necessary as it provides you with some control over how you are being identified online. To know more about VPN for YouTube, keep reading the article. Moreover, you can explore a top-ranked for doing so. tech blog How Does VPN Work? VPN creates a virtual encrypted channel between a remote server that is being operated by a VPN service and you. Now all the traffic is routed through this channel so that you can do completely secure surfing by masking your identity and location through the hiding of your IP address. Reasons Why You Need VPN For YouTube: Some reasons why you need a VPN for YouTube are mentioned below: Hide Your IP Address Hide your IP address while surfing YouTube. It hides the actual IP address of your computer from the advertisers, Trojans, and hackers, and even service providers. These objects may trackback all your activity to your IP address. Acts as a Proxy Bypass Change your geolocation, especially in the countries where YouTube is banned. Thus, you can change your VPN server’s geolocation and make it appear like your traffic is coming from another country where YouTube is not banned. Hence, it becomes your proxy and bypasses location restrictions from YouTube video streaming. For Safe Browsing To give you the online freedom you deserve and to let you surf the internet safely and privately without unwanted third-party tracking, it is necessary to avoid advertisers on YouTube from making money at the expense of your privacy. Our Personal Recommendation: 2 Best VPNs For YouTube Now, let us tell you two best VPNs for YouTube: 1. NordVPN NordVPN is currently one of the top recommended VPNs. With constant updating of VPN apps and faster speed, the performance of this VPN is pretty amazing. The NordVPN speed continues to improve as it keeps adding new servers to the network making its bandwidth much larger for all users. Apart from the speed, this VPN provides a security feature where advanced leak protection is provided. It offers more anonymity through their highly specialized servers and obfuscation so that VPN blocks can be avoided. The company has introduced double VPN servers along with Tor-over VPN servers to offer further anonymity. Pros: Live chatting option. User-friendly applications available Presence of double-hop VPN servers Presence of tor-over VPN servers A feature that supports ad blocking It does not maintain logs 30-days money-back guarantee 2. Ivacy VPN Ivacy VPN provides the latest encryption services along with other tools that include split tunneling, leak protection, and a very user-friendly interface of the apps. It also supports peer-to-peer and files sharing services. Its hosting services are built-in to accommodate and cover all sorts of platforms. Pros: User-friendly, easy to use, and suitable for all sorts of users Customizable tools and additional features Support all sorts of platform and devices Highly competitive speed Attractive rates 24/7 customer support service Final Word The bottom line is that as you have read above, every VPN has its own features. However, in the case of YouTube, you need a VPN that allows for fast speeds along with geolocation restrictions services. In the end, we advise you that you should always choose your VPN service provider according to your budget and security requirements.

Here Is What You Need To Know About VPN For YouTube

Image credit: Stock.Adobe.com In the past few years, you could stumble upon articles about how people are trying to improve their own health and bodies in ways that are not always customary. There was Jack Dorsey, his approach to fasting, former NASA employee Josiah Zayner was gene-editing technology - CRISPR - to upgrade his own DNA, while startup founder Serge Faguet was busy on "hacking" his body with drugs, clever gadgets, and new tech. explaining using spending $200k These examples are all part of a larger, ever more common  trend called biohacking. Biohackers are actively seeking a solution to improve their focus, confidence, intelligence, health, and, of course, life expectancy. These people want to become much more productive, more powerful, more intelligent, and live a very long life. What is the current state of biohacking? Can people really become superhumans? Who and what is responsible for biohacking and how can you control the risks while experimenting? I had the opportunity to discuss these questions with Sergey L. Mikheev, MD, PhD, Physician, Cardiologist, and Specialist in regenerative medicine at the clinical center, who is professionally involed in regenerative medicine and biohacking. Swiss Medica 21 *** How long has biohacking been around? And what has changed? The term "biohacking" emerged together with the concept of "DIY biology" in the late 1980s. After some time, in the mid-2000s, it got a second wind in the Silicon Valley tech community when entrepreneurs and engineers began the first experiments aimed at improving productivity and health. Now, biohacking is an actively developing trend. It is hip, especially in places like Silicon Valley. Biohacking is a collection of methods aimed at boosting humans’ physical, cognitive, and psychological parameters. Biohackers want to be more productive, and they want to slow down or even reverse the ageing process. They want to "hack" their bodies in order to become a more advanced and competitive life being. In fact, the biohacker's toolkit may already include some well-known tools like meditation or intermittent fasting. Many biohackers are also actively experimenting with anti-aging supplements, nootropics and other drugs. Extreme biohackers use cryotherapy, near-infrared saunas, and virtual float tanks. There are also so-called "grinders," who even implant high-tech devices like computer chips into their bodies to enhance its productivity. What could some of the real-life results of biohacking be? To talk about it, you should distinguish biohackers and other people that want to use science to enhance productivity, quality of life, fight aging. For example, there is a movement of transhumanists who advocate the development and implementation of sophisticated new tech that may be able to enhance the intellect (brain-computer integration) and physical parameters (via bionics) of all the people in the world. Unlike them, biohackers are working towards enhancing the capabilities of themselves only. They believe that by being more productive and healthier, they can bring more benefit to themselves as members of society. In the case of successful biohacking methods applications, the real-life results may be the increase of the human lifespan up to 100 years, while also being able to control some of biological processes in the human body. Are there any trends and developments in medicine that can be useful for biohacking? Regenerative medicine is the primary development. It is a branch of research in tissue engineering and molecular biology which deals with activating the body's ability to repair damaged tissues and organs. This involves using stem cells, which can trigger these regenerative processes with no possibility of severe side effects. These cells are the youngest in the body and have the most significant potential for development. Stem cells stimulate the recovery and update of all of the other tissue in the body. There are multiple ways of applying stem cells, including intravenous, intramuscular or local injections, depending on the purpose. This technique allows humans to become more vigorous in their approach, while it enhances sleep and stamina, and slows down or even reverses aging -  i.e., in some degree, it achieves many of the goals biohackers are targeting Wait, is this reverse aging idea even possible? Well, to answer this question, you need to understand what aging is from a biological point of view. It is a complex process involving changes in the intracellular and extracellular structures of the body. During the aging process, the functionality of cells responsible for recovery break down. Gradually, the body's cells do not working optimally, and the quality of their operations decreases. This influences all of the body's tissue and organs. It is known that, as we age, the reserves of the body's own stem cells responsible for regeneration are depleted. This process is currently unavoidable. However, we can inject the body with large amounts of stem cells to activate the body's ability to regenerate tissues and organs. This, in particular, leads to rejuvenation, endurance,  higher energy levels, better potency, etc. Also, stem cells can help boost the quality of sleep. You need less time to recover your power. The time you need to sleep therefore decreases, but you recuperate faster and better, and you do not want to sleep during the daytime. Okay. Let's assume I want to dive into biohacking. What should my first step be? You should start with a full check-up of your body. It is useful in any sense – you'll be aware of the current state of your health. For biohacking, you need to know the starting point to measure your results and effectiveness of any applied method. Plenty of biohacking methods have no evidentiary basis for now, so people are actually testing them. It is hard to predict the exact result, so you have to control and measure as many parameters, as well as the state of your body as regularly as possible. It is the only way to come up with a set of methods that work for each specific person. Besides a complete check-up, you will need to consult with several specialists (physicians, endocrinologists, neurologists, nutritionists, personal coaches, and so on). Then you can try to start with stem cells – you will need to go to a clinic specializing in cell-based treatments. The clinic should have a wide range of programs in order to be useful to the needs of biohackers. If the place offers additional complex therapies, this might be an advantage as well. Check for the availability of methods like: Intracellular Metabolism Recovery therapy (here is ), how it might look Xenon inhalation therapy, Hypoxi-hyperoxi therapy, Mesodiencephalic modulation (MDM), Plasmapheresis. These keywords will be useful in finding clinics that might be helpful for all biohacking needs. These additional therapies help to improve vitamin balance, trace element balance, and blood supply, ensure normal cellular respiration, normalize the hypothalamic-pituitary system, and improve cognitive functions. And how often can you use stem cells for biohacking needs? Can this be an ongoing process? Usually, an average lifespan of injected stem cells is about six months. However, the effect of stem cell therapy can last for up to one or two years. So, there is no sense in having injections more than once every six months. There are no risks: you can actually can this every few once days if you wanted to, and sometimes this is what you need to cure specific diseases. However, doing it this regularly makes  no sense in terms of biohacking, so once a year is perfect for getting sustainable, long-term results. Also, there is no such thing as addiction. Stem cells are not chemical. When stem cell therapy is provided, only biological, natural substances are used. It has been that there is no risk of long-term negative consequences in this therapy either. proven What is the main obstacle preventing more rapid biohacking development now? The major problem with biohacking is that it’s not affordable yet. T , posted by a biohacking advocate and tech entrepreneur, Serge Faguet, shows how much money you may spend on it — he put $200K into biohacking experiments prior to getting notable results. Still, you can start with a smaller investment, but even at the beginning, you have to undergo a thorough and costly check-up, do multiple tests, consult with several (expensive) medical professionals to come up with your own hacking plan. his article Sure, there are tools like specialized apps for biohackers which may help organize sleep (for example ) and control basic health parameters ( ), and mood ( ). But biohacking at full swing still requires massive investment. Sleep Cycle TrackMyStack HeadSpace Can you describe the typical biohacker nowadays? He or she obviously has money, but what else? Biohacking is about the quality of life, and this approach is used by those who understand that when you have energy and robust health, you can achieve better life results. So, usually, biohackers are successful people who value their time and personal productivity. Biohackers see the connection between personal productivity and their overall health. They believe their investments in health will have a positive ROI. These people actively follow tech and biotech news, analyze trends, and think about practical applications of the things they read about. You can safely bet that biohackers are ambitious: this is evident as they want to become better versions of themselves, stay positive, enjoy everyday communication with other people, and build stronger relationships. Could you share any advice on "responsible biohacking"? You should understand that biohacking is a pretty new discipline in terms of theresearch branch. Nowadays, there is not enough science-backed research proving the effectiveness of any method you might use as a part of your biohacking process. Yes, there are some cases with documented short-term positive effects, like or . However, no results of long-term studies are available at the moment. decreasing the risk of developing a disease reducing the symptoms of depression It is better to start with methods that have less possible side-effects, like stem cell injections, where there are no potential problems that have been documented. So, pick a clinic where you'll begin to your biohacking experience, and continuously monitor the results together with your doctors. So, can biohacking have side-effects? Well, it often involves using prescription-based drugs. These drugs can have side effects for sure. "Hackers" always act at their own risk. Anyone who has decided to upgrade himself to become smarter, more productive, and live longer should understand that experiments with health can bear risks. Even just dieting or going to the gym can lead to severe damage if the person is not healthy enough. So, experiments involving drugs and other things are even riskier. Let's talk about the future - do you think biohacking research and implementation will continue to grow? I believe that the possible future development of biohacking is directly connected to genetic engineering. If people find how they can experiment with DNA, it can have a dramatic impact on boosting health, cognitive abilities, anti-aging, and increasing quality of life. However, it is hard to expect any breakthroughs in this niche in the short term. Experiments with DNA are costly, and there is not enough research backing them up, so you can't predict the results, and the level of security is uncertain. While these problems are not being solved by genetic engineering, it will be safer to use a regenerative medicine toolkit for biohacking. This will become the primary trend in the next few years.

[Interview] Medical Expert Explains Biohacking, Its Future, and the Safest Way to Boost Yourself

Recently, I helped fix many of the technical issues on , an independent UK-based news website. As a relatively new platform, it’s had its fair share of technical hiccups. No Majesty Recently, I helped fix many of the technical issues on , an independent UK-based news website. As a relatively new platform, it’s had its fair share of technical hiccups. These are some of the most common. I’m writing this from a personal perspective: No Majesty 1. Page Speed Publishing sites often work best when articles are combined with relevant, high-quality images. Whilst these enhance the look and feel of content, it can result in a slower load time for web pages. The fix? Make sure you compress images throughout your site — make this automatic if possible. If you’re on WordPress, there’s several easy to use plugins that can do this for you. 2. Getting into Google News If you are regularly publishing fresh content on your website, it’s more than advisable that you get verified in Google News. Depending on the type of content that you publish, you could see a large amount of traffic captured from Google’s ‘Top Stories’ section. Whilst a lot has been said about Google’s strict guidelines for inclusion, the truth is it’s relatively simple to be accepted — the criteria tend to be: Your content is timely and relevantYour content is readablePublish news which is trustworthy — this can be established by looking at authors, or referenced information in your article.Creating a Google News XML sitemap helps — on a Wordpress site this is particularly easy. 3. Old content getting lost in the depths of your site architecture This is a bit of a classic. You publish a new article, and hey ho, it starts to rank in Google search pretty well for relevant keywords, and pretty quickly too. But alas, over time, these rankings fade. The most common reason is that publishing sites quickly bury this content under a heap of new posts, and that means Google’s crawler can’t reach the post as easily. And that, finally, means Google will think the post is less important than your other, newer stuff. The fix? Create more links to your old posts — there’s a bunch of ways to do this, but some of my favorites include:Adding internal links between all posts related to a given subjectMaking sure all your content is included in an XML sitemapCreating a fresh ‘Super topic’ post, a round up that naturally includes links to old content. 4. Avoiding spam This is less of a publisher-specific issue, more of a Wordpress-specific issue. If you have a website which opens up the ability for users to comment, you will quickly realise this is often exploited by spammers. On a WordPress site, the easiest way to avoid spam comments and trackbacks is to install a plugin such as . Just make sure you keep monitoring after installation to make sure it’s made your website airtight. Akismet 5. High bounce rate Bounce rate is an interesting statistic. Some people ignore it, and some people obsess over it. For clarity, bounce rate means the percentage of users who leave your website after viewing only a single page. There’s no magic number for what it should be, and it’s worth bearing in mind that the percentage of bounces will always be higher for publisher sites compared to other types such as ecommerce. That said, we tackle high bounce rates by linking internally to other relevant articles from the one a user is currently reading. 6. Keep your hardware up to date This is one that appears a lot simpler than it actually is. Whilst most CMS’ will prompt you to update to their latest version automatically (Wordpress updates an obvious example) there may well be other aspects to keep on top of, depending on your set up. If you run a Wordpress or other open source CMS-based site, look out for updates to any third party plugins installed. These are a favorite target for hackers, and whilst updating plugins doesn’t prevent them from being exploited, it can help. In addition, remember to update your website to the latest version of PHP, if you use Wordpress or another CMS which is based on this. You should be able to do this via your web hosting platform. 7. Website design Having great content is all well and good, but if your site doesn’t look up to scratch you’re just asking for users to reject it. In its few years as a news website, there have been a number of different designs for No Majesty, all pushing towards a slick, uncluttered view of the content. The current WordPress theme being used is called . Authentic 8. Optimising for SEO This one’s a bit of a classic, but again often overlooked amongst all the other technical issues. Obviously, the content needs to be discoverable by search engines, and you want the crawlers used by search engines to be able to see how your content ‘flows’. Make sure you follow the below as a minimum: Have an XML sitemapHave a Google News sitemap (see point #2)Use heading tags — h1, h2, etc.Include relevant keywords in your headline — and in your contentUse image alt text I wish you the best of luck in your endeavour for a website which has great content and/or is a technical marvel!

Most Common Tech Issues to Plague a News Publishing Website — and How to Fix Them

it is the month of the cupid, proposals, love, and commitments. No, this blog is not about love advice and certainly, it is not clickbait. But, since it is the month of Valentine’s day, let’s try to do the match-making of the most buzz technologies i.e. “Love is in the air”, Big Data and Blockchain. First, let’s study the profiles of the probable perfect pair: Big Data “Worldwide Big Data market for software and services are projected to increase by $103B in 2027.” revenues According to Gartner, “Big Data is high-volume, high velocity, and possesses variety of information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.” This means it possesses large complex data sets that have to be processed and analyzed to fetch the useful information that benefits the business. Certain Basic Tenets Of Big Data Refers to the massive amount of data that grows exponentially with time It cannot be processed with conventional data processing techniques Includes data mining, data storage, data analysis, data sharing, and data visualization Blockchain “Worldwide, global Blockchain market size is to increase by $23.3 billion in 2023.” projected According to Gartner, A blockchain is an expanding list of cryptographically signed, irrevocable transactional records shared by all participants in a network. Each record contains a timestamp and reference links to previous transactions. With this information, anyone with the access rights can trackback transactions, history belonging to any participants. In simple terms, Blockchain is a database that is shared across a network of computers. Once the record is added, it is very difficult to change and to make sure that all the copies of the database are same; the network maintains a constant check. Certain Basic Tenets Of Blockchain No central gatekeeper is required to verify the transactions and authenticate the source — this is done independently by multiple nodes More than one contributor can modify the database at the same time, from any location. If a node is broken/compromised; the rest of the network remains unaffected Each contributor audits the ledger and promotes trust amongst other contributors So, the agenda here is to understand that if Big Data and Blockchain technology can they become a perfect match? Let us find out. right swiped each other, Blockchain + Big Data: Is This A Match Made In Heaven? By 2030, the contained in the blockchain ledger might be worth up to 20% of the global Big Data market and generate up to $100 billion in annual income. data Both Big Data and Blockchain are highly popular; they are appealing to many and they have been the best bet for many in the industry. They individually are progressing in leaps and bounds. But for any relationship to work out, it must be formed on three important pillars namely So, the task is to know that if these two are made to be a perfect match, whether they have the ability to establish a relationship on these pillars or not? transparency, security, and companionship. Security: The problem with Big Data is that due to the privacy concerns, currently all the data lakes and pools are either hidden or are exposed to limited data with the fear of being breached. But, for data to be turned into valuable information, it is essential that data flow is genuine and tamper proof. This is where Blockchain comes in, the very basic purpose of Blockchain is to provide Blockchain contains the chain of digital ‘blocks’ which records the transaction. Each block is connected to all the blocks before and after it which makes it difficult to tamper the single record. In case of theft, the hacker would need to change the record of that block as well as those linked to it to avoid detection. secure and tamper-proof data ledger. So, if the Blockchain becomes the valentine of Big Data, the tech companies can make the lake open to more contemporaries without the fear of data leak. Transparency: Another problem with large data pools and lakes is the amount of (The information which is not being used). There are certain amounts of data that the data scientists cannot access sometimes due to incomplete or outdated data and sometimes because the data is not in the readable format. “dark data” But, with the help of the distributed ledger formed by the Blockchain technology, the data scientists can analyze petabytes of raw unstructured data and provide all the required information, reducing the amount of dark data. Moreover, Blockchain will filter the data and use only the authentic data that will be approved by all the nodes which make the analytics better and the Big Data more efficient. Companionship: Current infrastructure for storing data is inefficient. It relies on third-parties like cloud storage which results in issues like scaling, duplicate data, hindered performance due to a large amount of data, privacy risks, high price etc. Blockchain Technology makes storing efficient. With the help of distributed networks, files are broken and spread across multiple nodes. Files are encrypted which disable other nodes to participate in the network. File loss and data redundancy are prevented and extra copies are only stored if in case there is an error in transmitting data. Blockchain storage costs between 50% -100%. can reduce the price of cloud computing Convergence Of Blockchain And Big Data: Why Do We Care? The process of with Big Data and Blockchain. With Blockchain, one cannot modify the record of the data; hence Big Data can use its analytical skills to find out the fraud activities. detecting real-time fraud becomes easy With the match of Big Data and Blockchain, the social data of the public can be without affecting the strict “Privacy Policies”. easily transferred using the Blockchain Corrupted data has no room to enter the chain as it will not match with the other data on machines. Blockchain and Big Data enable the collection and classification of higher quality and accurate data. With the adoption of Blockchain and Big Data, businesses can gain trust as their personal data is secured and private. Blockchain has the potential to where companies can share, sell and offer their data and insights directly with each other. monetize the data Data analysts prefer to mine for insights This helps the organization to uncover the powerful demographic information. social data of key cryptographic currency trends. Blockchain and Big Data help in streamlining the access to the data. Users across various departments can have the data required for analysis purpose. This smoothens up the workflow and time cycle of data access and analysis. It and delivers rich and for businesses. increases accuracy reliable insights Data intelligence service along with the blockchain are emerging and helping financial institutions, governments and other organizations to uncover the hidden pattern of data. Industries That Have Tried And Tested Their Compatibilities Omnilytics is a leading fashion and beauty market intelligence platform that provides actionable insights for sales, marketing and merchandizing. The company aims to combine Blockchain with Big Data analytics to power their smart contracts, data exchange and other protocols and APIs. Using Blockchain with Big Data offers a new level of trust, honesty and transparency as data partners can track the performance of their data. Omnilytics: Provenance is a platform that helps brands and retailers to build customer trust through transparency. Using Big Data and Blockchain Technology, the platform gathers and shares key product information in a way that’s secure, trustworthy and accessible. Through this platform, the customer can get verified information about what the product is made of, where it came etc. and retailers’ benefit form product tracking and empowering customers with new information. Provenance: The Storj is a platform for decentralized cloud object storage, i.e affordable, secured, easy to use and private. It uses client-side encryption so that data owners can trust that and only have access to their files. If the power goes down or data center is corrupted, the algorithm ensures that data is distributed widely enough to maintain high availability. Storj: A Way Forward The Blockchain and Big Data serve all the qualities that are needed for an ideal combination. The synergy between Big Data and Blockchain can really make operations fast, safe, flexible and transparent. Together with Blockchain, Big Data operations performed on the generated data can help to improve businesses and drive-in lot of opportunities. However, there is much more to explore and this is just the tip of iceberg!

Proposing Blockchain with Big Data This Valentine’s Day

Seeking Work. Resumes. Mismatch. Bad Hiring. Cost. Culture. In all , context is important. communication . Don’t we often say that? It depends Unfortunately, most of us overlook the context when we make the most important decisions in our life. — a job, a contract, or partnership, . While seeking work and also when hiring The Pain — A Wrong Commitment. While seeking work, we are committed to something what wrote for the first time (source ). We are doing it how employers were expecting in (source ) — they asked for a . Even the of a game changer in 2003 — LinkedIn could not dent our commitment. Leonardo da Vinci in 1482 Business Insider 1950s BeBusinessed resume introduction A resume is a woefully inadequate measure to communicate our experiences, skills, and strengths, . Thousands of templates (does not matter if they call it fancy and custom branded — the fancier the shittier) do not help it as moving a couple of bricks here and there in a wall rarely adds value and context to the overall building. meaningfully When applicants learnt that organizations (Applicant Tracking Systems) to filter resumes, they started just as copywriters all over the world were writing web copy for search engines. use ATS writing resumes for ATS Not for humans. in 2008 (see the TrackBack response in comments of the post). Today when organizations are evolving for their branding, marketing, and in their UX processes to embrace storytelling, hiring and job seeking continue to be in the age-old merry-go-round mode. Seth Godin questioned resumes The Missing Script. There is a lot of gap in what the organization communicates what they need and what the candidates convey that they can offer. The conventional job descriptions target skills. Either they are feeding ATS, or they are not investing in writing custom scripts. Even if some of them do, the resumes on the other sides cannot respond. Hiring is a lot about guesswork and it is the biggest challenge for many organizations in the world. Bad hiring . , Vice President, Human Resources, Xerox said in 2014 that . But it does not address the core issue —the linear subjectivity involved in hiring. costs so much Teri Morse Big data can take the guesswork out of the hiring process Of late, is changing the hiring game to an extent but we need both the hands to clap. Textio Scripts Needed When I worked in coveda in 2005, I lauded the diversity there. It seemed as if . Just as a seasoned filmmaker first writes a good script and then picks the best-fit actors for their roles. while hiring, they were not really looking for people — they were looking for roles The job description was a meticulously crafted script and this script was a part of the larger organization narrative. The hunt was for a role. Roles Needed. RIP Resumes. Resumes are the order of the day — for hiring managers and for those who seek work. Old order? “The old order changeth yielding place to new.” — Alfred Tennyson Organizations invest a lot to plan, write, and publish their case studies to share how they identify a problem, solve it, and how it benefits their customers. A role that invites scripts from organizations so that they hire us for our role. While seeking work, candidates too need to write success stories. They should be available as a role and not merely as a skills-set. Roles and Scripts. The team at are working on . Watch out for an update, soon. vhite something in this direction : I am happy to share that . You can subscribe to stay connected for it is live. Update Stippi is on Product Hunt Upcoming Products. Experience. Stories. Vinish Garg | I am a for startups and their goals, for content, UX, and for customer experience. Connect with me via or at . EEES (External Eye Experience Specialist) @vingar vinishgarg.com

RIP Resumes. For Roles — For Scripts

Docker is a powerful tool, however learning how to use it the right way could take a long time especially with the rapidly growing ecosystem of containers which could be confusing, that is why I had the idea to start writing . Painless Docker is a complete and detailed guide (for beginners and intermediate levels) to , , , , , , , & Docker and Docker clusters in order to create a high quality microservices applications. Painless Docker create deploy optimize secure trace debug log orchestrate monitor This article is more detailed in the of . bonus chapters Painless Docker Book Using Docker, Docker Swarm, Amazon RDS (Aurora) + EC2, GlusterFS & Traefik, we are going to create a highly available and scalable WordPress cluster. Preparing The Infrastructure I am using Amazon machines but you can use you prefered infrastructure. EC2 Start by creating two ( machines . EC2) in two different availability zones In this tutorial, I am using: eu-west-1aeu-west-1b The first machine will be the of the Swarm cluster and the second one will be the . manager worker but it depends on how available you want your cluster to be, . This is just an example you may create 3 managers (or more) for more availability The manager will have a public because it will receive all of the ingoing requests and redirect them to Docker that will handle the internal load balancing between the containers living in the (same machine in this case) and the containers living in the . IP manager worker Don’t forget to add an to each machine. Elastic Block Store We should have two instances: Using , we can verify that the is attached to our machine: lsbsk EBS NAME    MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTxvda    202:0    0   8G  0 disk `-xvda1 202:1    0   8G  0 part /xvdb    202:16   0  10G  0 disk On each machine, create our : filesystem sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/xvdb Creating A Trusted Pool Using GlusterFS GlusterFS is a scale-out network-attached storage file system. Using common off-the-shelf hardware, you can create large, distributed storage solutions for media streaming, data analysis, and other data- and bandwidth-intensive tasks. GlusterFS was developed originally by Gluster, Inc. and then by Red Hat, Inc., as a result of Red Hat acquiring Gluster in 2011. Let’s start by installing : GlusterFS apt-get  install -y glusterfs-server If you are using another or another distribution, adapt this command to your need. OS Linux GlusterFS Logo I created a machine with no public (the ), this machine will not be able to reach Internet and install unless you setup an Amazon . If you are just making some tests or not familiar with , create a machine with public or create an then assign it to the machine. Notice: IP worker GlusterFS NAT instance AWS IP EIP Create a mount target ( ): brick mkdir -p /glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com : A brick is a directory on an underlying disk . If one of the bricks goes down, there is a hardware failure to make the data available. Notice filesystem Use file to permanently mount the to the new brick: fstab EBS /dev/xvdb /glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com xfs    defaults        0 0 Now use in order to apply the modifications that we added to the file. mount /dev/xvdb fstab Under each mount point a directory used for volume: /glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com GlusterFS mkdir /glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com/wordpress Let’s add these lines to the file on each server , we will need this in a following step: /etc/hosts/ 172.31.43.166 node1172.31.14.90 node2 is the and is our . In order to test this configuration, you can execute: from : node1 manager node2 worker ping node2 node1 PING node2 (172.31.14.90) 56(84) bytes of data.64 bytes from node2 (172.31.14.90): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.857 ms From the ( ), type the following command to establish cluster nodes trust relationship: manager node1 Gluster gluster peer probe node2 You should have as an output, otherwise check your firewall settings or tail your logs. peer probe: success Now we have a working trusted pool. GlusterFS A storage pool is a trusted network of storage servers ( and in our case). When we started the first server, the storage pool consisted of that server alone. When we added additional storage server to the storage pool (using the command from the storage server that is already trusted), we created a trusted storage pool of 2 servers. GlusterFS node1 node2 node2 probe node1 An Example Of A GlusterFS Architecture Now, from the manager server, we should create a two-way mirror volume that we will call using: booksfordevops-com-wordpress gluster volume create booksfordevops_com-wordpress replica 2 node1:/glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com/wordpress node2:/glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com/wordpress You will get this output: volume create: booksfordevops_com-wordpress: success: please start the volume to access data You can see the volume if you type gluster volume list booksfordevops_com-wordpress Now you should start it using : gluster volume start booksfordevops_com-wordpress If everything is ok, you will get a similar output to this: volume start: booksfordevops_com-wordpress: success Our volume should be healthy but you can check its status using : gluster volume status Status of volume: booksfordevops_com-wordpressGluster process                             TCP Port  RDMA Port  Online  Pid------------------------------------------------------------------------------Brick node1:/glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com/wordpress                             49152     0          Y       1868 Brick node2:/glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com/wordpress                             49152     0          Y       17591NFS Server on localhost                     N/A       N/A        N       N/A  Self-heal Daemon on localhost               N/A       N/A        Y       1894 NFS Server on node2                         2049      0          Y       17612Self-heal Daemon on node2                   N/A       N/A        Y       17613

Task Status of Volume booksfordevops_com-wordpress------------------------------------------------------------------------------There are no active volume tasks Now that the server is set, we need to setup the client side. Let’s create the directory (in each node) to be used by the client in each node of our cluster: GlusterFS mkdir -p /data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress We need to mount a shared directory on from the and the same directory on from . node2 node1 node1 node2 On , add this line at the end of file: node1 /etc/fstab node2:/booksfordevops_com-wordpress       /data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress       glusterfs     defaults,_netdev  0  0 On , add this line at the end of file: node2 /etc/fstab node1:/booksfordevops_com-wordpress       /data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress       glusterfs     defaults,_netdev  0  0 Then on both hosts, type . mount -a Creating Our Swarm Cluster The next step is to install Docker on both hosts: curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh Then initialize the Swarm cluster: docker swarm init Execute the last command on the and you will get a command to execute on the : manager worker docker swarm join \    --token XXXXXX-x-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxx \    172.31.43.116:2377 If everything is ok, the will join the cluster: worker This node joined a swarm as a worker. Deploying Our Application In this tutorial, we want to create a blog, we can host the or the database in our trusted pool but in my specefic case I created an database. Wordpress Mysql MariaDB GlusterFS Aurora We are going to host files in the storage pool we created, that points to . Wordpress /data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress This is the Docker Compose v3 file that we are going to deploy: version: '3'networks:  booksfordevops_com-network:

services:  wordpress:    image: wordpress:4.7.3-php7.1-apache    ports:      - 8000:80    networks:      - booksfordevops_com-network    volumes:      - /data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress:/var/www/html    environment:      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: xxxxx.cluster-xxxxx.eu-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com:3306      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: user      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: password      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: db_name      WORDPRESS_TABLE_PREFIX: wp_    deploy:      mode: replicated      replicas: 1      labels: [APP=WORDPRESS]      restart_policy:        condition: always For security reasons, do not put your file in the same directory as your files in , it will be publicly accessible. Notice: docker-compose.yml Wordpress `/data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress In order to deploy our website, we should execute this command: docker stack deploy --compose-file=docker-compose.yml booksfordevops_com We can use a similar command to the following one in order to deploy the app: Wordpress docker network -d overlay booksfordevops_com-network

docker service create --name booksfordevops_com_wordpress \--publish 8000:80 \--mount type=bind,source=/data/wp,target=/var/www/html \-e WORDPRESS_DB_HOST=x.cluster-x.eu-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com:3306 \-e WORDPRESS_DB_USER=user \-e WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=password \-e WORDPRESS_DB_NAME=db_name \-e WORDPRESS_TABLE_PREFIX=wp_  \--replicas 1 \--network booksfordevops_com-network \wordpress:4.7.3-php7.1-apache But putting all together in a Docker Compose v3 file is a more organised way to deploy our app. You may have some premission problems with your fresh installation, you will need to execute these commands: Wordpress cd /data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress

chown www-data:www-data  -R *

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;  

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \; In both servers, you can now notice that files are mounted from the service containers to the host volume: Wordpress ls -lrth /data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  418 Sep 25  2013 index.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 3.3K May 24  2015 wp-cron.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  364 Dec 19  2015 wp-blog-header.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 1.6K Aug 29  2016 wp-comments-post.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 3.0K Aug 31  2016 xmlrpc.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 5.4K Sep 27 21:36 wp-activate.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 4.5K Oct 14 19:39 wp-trackback.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  30K Oct 19 04:47 wp-signup.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 3.3K Oct 25 03:15 wp-load.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  34K Nov 21 02:46 wp-login.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 2.4K Nov 21 02:46 wp-links-opml.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  16K Nov 29 05:39 wp-settings.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  20K Jan  2 18:51 license.txt-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 7.9K Jan 11 05:15 wp-mail.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 7.3K Jan 11 17:46 readme.htmldrwxr-xr-x 18 www-data www-data 8.0K Mar  6 16:00 wp-includesdrwxr-xr-x  9 www-data www-data 4.0K Mar  6 16:00 wp-admin-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 2.7K Mar 19 19:41 wp-config-sample.php-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 3.2K Mar 19 19:41 wp-config.phpdrwxr-xr-x  4 www-data www-data   52 Mar 19 19:51 wp-content If you check the created brick on each server, you will find the same files: ls -lrth /glusterfs/bricks/booksfordevops.com At this step, we have a working installation that you can reach using the address of the and the port . Wordpress IP manager 8000 Adding Traefik: is a reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices and supports Docker and Docker Swarm (and other backends like / , , , , , and _Rest API_s). Træfɪk HTTP Mesos Marathon Consul Etcd Zookeeper BoltDB Amazon ECS Let’s create a service to run on the manager ( ). The reverse proxy will run on a separate network ( ). Traefik --constraint=node.role==manager --network traefik-net docker network -d overlay traefik-net; docker service create --name traefik \--constraint=node.role==manager \--publish 80:80 \--publish 8080:8080 \--mount type=bind,source=/var/run/docker.sock,target=/var/run/docker.sock \ --network traefik-net \traefik:v1.1.0-rc1 \--docker \--docker.swarmmode \--docker.domain=traefik \--docker.watch \--web Updating Wordpress Service In order to make our website work with we are going to update its file and add it to the same network . I added also some labels related to like and : Wordpress Traefik docker-compose Traefik traefik-net Traefik port frontend.rule version: '3'networks:  traefik-net:    external: true  booksfordevops_com-network:

services:  wordpress:    image: wordpress:4.7.3-php7.1-apache    ports:      - 8001:80    networks:      - booksfordevops_com-network      - traefik-net    volumes:      - /data/booksfordevops_com-wordpress:/var/www/html    environment:      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: xxxx.cluster-xxxxx.eu-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com:3306      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: user      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: password      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: db_name      WORDPRESS_TABLE_PREFIX: wp_

    deploy:      mode: replicated      replicas: 2      labels:         APP: WORDPRESS        traefik.port: 80        traefik.frontend.rule: "Host:booksfordevops.com,www.booksfordevop.com"

      restart_policy:        condition: on-failure Update the deployment using docker stack deploy --compose-file=docker-compose.yml booksfordevops_com You can check if the configured domain is accessible using a simple , in my case: curl curl -H Host:booksfordevops.com  http://127.0.0.1 You can also go to the health dashboard in order to see things like the response time and the status codes of our application. What We Learned We saw how to build a highly available website, where storage and computing are distributed into two different regions. Wordpress Within each machine we can scale to more than one container and have another level of resilience. EC2 Wordpress Our reverse proxy can check the health of each container and manage to redirect traffic to the working ones. We used modern tools and technologies like: Amazon RDS Amazon EC2 GlusterFS Docker Docker Swarm Traefik Our website is working, you can subscribe and wait for release. Books For DevOps Connect Deeper This article is part of . Painless Docker Book: Unlock The Power Of Docker & Its Ecosystem is a practical guide to master and based . Painless Docker Docker its ecosystem on real world examples Painless Docker tends to be a complete and detailed guide to create, deploy, optimize, secure, trace, debug, log, orchestrate & monitor Docker and Docker clusters. Through this book you will learn how to use Docker in development and production environments and the DevOps pipeline between them in order to build a modern microservices applications. If you resonated with this article, please subscribe to : . DevOpsLinks An Online Community Of Diverse & Passionate DevOps, SysAdmins & Developers From All Over The World You can find me on , or my and you can also check my books: & . Twitter Clarity blog SaltStack For DevOps The Jumpstart Up If you liked this post, please recommend and share it to your followers.

Architecting a Highly Available and Scalable Wordpress Using Docker Swarm, Traefik & GlusterFS…

Building a new website? WordPress already has great features for building amazing websites, but with these plugins you can have total faith in your new site. From tools for SEO to security and content creation, this list includes the top 22 plugins you should consider adding to your site. Yoast SEO Get even better SEO on your WordPress site with this plugin. Yoast creates more optimized content by helping you choose focus keywords and employ them throughout your articles. The plugin also features Page Analysis, which checks for small details we sometimes forget such as keyword-tagging images and meta descriptions. Duplicate Post This is just what it sounds like- you can actually clone any of your posts or pages. This is useful when you create a page template you want to reuse- just create a new draft of the same page each time you need it. You can choose which page roles have access to cloning pages. Akismet Akismet checks your comments and lets you review those that seem like spam. You can choose to clear comments that you determine to be spam, and the plugin will keep a status history so you can track changes. The tool will also scan any comment URLS for broken links or spam. Contact Form 7 Previous users say this one is a necessity and is very easy to install and use. It is a simple plugin that allows you to manage and customize multiple contact forms. There are many plugins like this out there but choose this one for simplicity and efficiency. WP Super Cache WP Super Cache generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. It serves this lighter html file as opposed to processing the more weighted WordPress PHP scripts. This plugin will help your server cope with a front page appearance on social networking sites. Wordfence Security Wordfence will check your site for infection, secure your site, and make it faster. The plugin can protect your site from being hacked, block attacks, and help recover from previous hacks. Wordfence uses data from every site it protects to make the plugin better and more effective every day. WooCommerce WooCommerce gives you the ability to integrate ecommerce on your site in a seamless manner. It was built to work perfectly with WordPress sites and is used by 30% of online stores. If you want to sell, ship, and receive payments on your website- look no further. Google XML Sitemaps This plugin helps search engines better index your content by creating an XML sitemap for engines to examine your site more efficiently. It will notify all major search engines when you post about your indexed content and will not slow down your site. Win-win! Disable Comments This can be used to disable comments on an entire network or just on certain post types. Good for avoiding spam issues on content where comments are unnecessary anyways. iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) Without some sort of protection, your WordPress site is vulnerable to attacks. You will have access to over 30 ways to secure and protect your website when you install this plugin. It fixes common holes in your security and allows for easy activation on whichever features you want to use. UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration Updraft schedules backups and makes restoration simple, if needed. This way if somehow you have a server crash or a security breach, you have a reliable backup for your site and all related files. Duplicator With this plugin you can basically take an entire site and move it to a different location. This is another way to create backups of your site if necessary. Advanced Custom Fields If you want more flexible data, use this plugin and discover powerful, professional, and intuitive fields. You can chose from multiple input types and create new fields visually and simply. This plugin saves time and streamlines the process of creating templates, which is extremely important when you’re building a new site. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP When you start your website, you’ll definitely want to employ Google Analytics to track all aspects of your site and its functionality. With this plugin, your analytics stats are more easily accessible as they are integrated as you use WordPress. Right there on your dashboard screen, you’ll have a real-time user count and traffic sources, information about sessions and page views, and more. Redirection Redirection helps you tidy up and loose ends your site may have. In particular, it keeps track of 404 errors and 301 redirections and keeps a full log for all redirected URLs. WP-Optimize This plugin helps you optimize your site by cleaning it up without much manual labor. You have the option to remove spam comments, trashed comments, akismet metadata from comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. You can enable or disable trackbacks, comments, and automatic optimization. Check out the plugin’s details for a full list of its abilities. Shortcodes Ultimate Install more than 50 short codes which help easily create tabs, buttons, boxes, different sliders, responsive videos and much more. Fast Secure Contact Form Easily add, remove, and reorder fields and create contact forms that allow users to send an email to your site admin. Includes multiple forms, confirmation emails, and post-message redirect. BackWPup Free — WordPress Backup Plugin Schedule complete automatic backups of your site and decide where and which content will be stored. You can restore the backed-up installation with a simple .zip file if you need to (better safe than sorry.) There are a lot of extra features that could be useful in the pro form of this plugin, but the free version is pretty great as is. MailChimp for WordPress With this plugin, you can easily connect your MailChimp and WordPress accounts. This way, you can add sign-up methods to your website and get more subscribers to your MailChimp lists. The sign-up forms are visually appealing, user friendly, and mobile optimized. Ninja Forms The Ninja Forms framework provides a drag-and-drop method for easily creating forms and managing submissions. There is no limitation to the number of forms, fields, emails, actions or submissions you can manage with this tool. WP Smush Say “goodbye” to bulky data that slows down your site. With WP Smush, lighten the load with image file size reductions, performance improvements, and SEO boosting. The faster your site loads, the more likeable it is to search engines. If you’re building a new website or making updates to your existing site, consider some of these plugins to make your job easier and more effective. Please let us know in the comments if there are any plugins you find useful that aren’t listed here- we’d love to hear your suggestions!

22 Top Rated Free WordPress Plugins to Start a Website

Stacks!! Hey, guys Lately, I was solving some algorithm challenges in hackerrank.com. I just has a thought of sharing a simple challenge with the medium community. :) Problem Statement Given a string expression, find whether the given expression is balanced or not. Sample-1 Input:{ [ ( ) ] } Output:True Sample-2 Input:{ [ } ] Output:False Sample-3 Input:{ { [ ] Output:False Try to solve this problem before looking in to the solution. Solution This problem is so simple. For every opening brackets, you have to check whether the corresponding closing brackets are present in order. We can solve this problem using Stack. If you want a recap about stack no problem take a look at . this First, we start by iterating through the string and if we find an opening bracket we push it to the stack. And if we find a closing bracket we are popping the top element from the stack to check whether the closing bracket is associated with the opening bracket (top element popped). If not, we are returning false or else we continue. And remember after iterating through the entire string, we have to check the size of the stack. If the size of the stack is not zero (i.e) not empty it means that some closing brackets are missing. If you don’t get it stay with me :) Pseudo Code: expression = { [ ( ) ] } for each element in the stringi=0We have an opening braces so we push it to the stack.Stack: { i=1We have an opening braces so we push it to the stack.Stack:  [{i=2We have an opening braces so we push it to the stack.Stack: ([{i=3We have an closing braces so we pop the element from stack.Popped element: (Closing braces: )We continue to iterate because the opening braces is associated with the closed braces.Stack: [{i=4We have an closing braces so we pop the element from stack.Popped element: [Closing braces: ]We continue to iterate because the opening braces is associated with the closed braces.Stack: { i=5We have an closing braces so we pop the element from stack.Popped element: {Closing braces: }We continue to iterate because the opening braces is associated with the closed braces.Stack: Empty The stack is empty which means that we have an equal equal number of closing braces for all opening braces. Code Implementation In Java: import java.util.*; class BalancedExpression {public static void main(String args[]) {System.out.println("Balanced Expression");Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);String input = in.next();if (isExpressionBalanced(input)) {System.out.println("The expression is balanced");}else {System.out.println("The expression is not balanced");} static boolean isExpressionBalanced(String input) {Stack stack = new Stack();for (int i=0; i<input.length(); i++) {if (input.charAt(i) == '(' || input.charAt(i) == '{'|| input.charAt(i) == '[') {stack.push(input.charAt(i));}if (input.charAt(i) == ')' || input.charAt(i) == '}'|| input.charAt(i) == ']') {if (stack.empty()) {return false;}char top_char = (char) stack.pop(); if ( (top\_char == '(' && input.charAt(i) != ')') || (top\_char == '{' && input.charAt(i) != '}') || (top\_char == '\[' && input.charAt(i) != '\]') ) {  
  return false;  
 }     
} }return stack.empty();}}} You can see the source code here If you are interested in more competitive challenges you can subscribe to my newsletter to get a solved competitive programming challenge weekly. :) :) DS Weekly

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