At $WORK we were running a MySQL setup that required an unusually large number of concurrent connections. Most of them were idle. Only a few dozen connections were running queries. The total number of connections was around twelve thousand and was growing slowly. When the total number of connections reached close to 12,200, things started to break. New clients could no longer connect to the database. The error in the MySQL log was: ...
Migrating a Very Old WordPress Blog to Hugo on Cloudflare Pages
Happy New 2026 everyone! This site used to run on a very old WordPress instance. It worked, but it was not kept up to date; the Cloudflare proxy likely helped prevent it from being compromised. Updating WordPress in 2026 did not feel like a good use of time, so moving the blog to a static site made the most sense. Hugo was chosen because it is relatively common for static sites and integrates well with Cloudflare and GitHub Pages. ...
[messaging] Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto
https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780.html - how does antispam currently work at large email providers - how would widespread E2E crypto affect this - what are the options for moving things to the client (and pros, cons) - is this feasible for email? - How do things change when moving from email to other sorts of async messaging (e.g. text messaging) or new protocols - i.e. are there unique aspects of existing email protocols, or are these general problems? // I worked at Google for about 7.5 years. For about 4.5 of those I worked on the Gmail abuse team, which is very tightly linked with the spam team (they use the same software, share the same on-call rotations etc). // ...
Is TLS Fast Yet?
https://istlsfastyet.com/ Published on Jul 24, 2014 “TLS has exactly one performance problem: not enough sites are using it. Everything else can and will be optimized. A hands on look at how to achieve 1-RTT handshakes, eliminate validation latency, and more.” Slides: bit.ly/fastTLS by Ilya Grigorik ( @ google) . See the bottom of the page on Nginx configs on how to improve TLS performance
Incentive Pay Considered Harmful - Joel on Software
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html A good old Joel article on why you shouldn’t not treat your engineers like pre-K kids.
The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild
https://securehomes.esat.kuleuven.be/~gacar/persistent/index.html
Software Quality - Be Careful What You Measure - Beyond Bandwidth
http://blog.level3.com/culture/software-quality-be-careful-what-you-measure/ Notes from level3 communications about what to measure (and what not) in software development
[SmartBear software] Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review (.pdf)
http://smartbear.com/SmartBear/media/pdfs/best-kept-secrets-of-peer-code-review.pdf Book on code review from Smartbear – a maker of software for code review
HN's favorite tech talks
http://bl.ocks.org/ricardobeat/raw/5343140/ Collection of great takes from Hacker News/YCombinator ppl. Full discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511466
Developer Productivity Report 2012: Tools, Tech, Devs and Data | zeroturnaround.com
http://zeroturnaround.com/blog/developer-productivity-report-2012-java-tools-tech-devs-and-data/ We’re not much for fanfare here at ZeroTurnaround, but this is our most ambitious report that we’ve ever created. This year, over 1800 respondents shared their take on “the developer life” with us, with 1100 Java-focused surveys completed.