$ cat post/a-segfault-at-three-/-the-cluster-held-until-dawn-/-the-cron-still-fires.md
a segfault at three / the cluster held until dawn / the cron still fires
Title: February 1, 2010 - A Mélange of Chaos
Today, as I reflect back on the tech world of 2010, it feels like we were at the cusp of a major shift. The DevOps term was still gaining traction, and every day seemed to bring some new development that would change our industry for good or ill.
I remember that morning when I sat down with my team to review our infrastructure. We had just finished deploying a large-scale rewrite using Chef for configuration management, and the chaos engineer from Netflix was giving us tips on how to build better fault tolerance into our systems. It was exciting but also daunting—like trying to tame a wild horse.
One of the things that kept nagging at me was the NoSQL hype. I remember reading about Cassandra and Riak, thinking they might be just what we needed for handling our growing user base, but there were still so many unknowns. Would we even know how to scale properly? Or would we end up with a distributed mess?
Speaking of scaling, Heroku’s sale to Salesforce had been big news. The idea that such a small, elegant platform was being swallowed by one of the behemoths of enterprise software made me wonder what the future held for all these cool tools we were using. Would they survive? Would we need to adapt again?
Meanwhile, back at our desk, we were wrestling with Nginx and Apache. Our stack was a mix—some parts used Nginx as a reverse proxy, others still clung to Apache’s stability. We couldn’t decide which to fully commit to, but the battle between these two web servers was fierce. I remember arguing one day that Nginx had its place, even if it wasn’t perfect for everything.
On another front, Chef and Puppet were locked in a war of their own. We’d chosen Chef as our configuration management tool, but there was still a lot of debate about which was better. The community forums were filled with passionate users defending their choices, and I found myself on both sides at different times. I appreciated the flexibility Chef offered, but sometimes Puppet’s declarative nature just felt more natural.
The continuous delivery book by Jez Humble had been published around this time, and it really hit home for us as we started to think about automating our deployments more rigorously. We needed a way to ensure that when something broke in production, we could roll back quickly and fix it without too much manual intervention. That’s when I started writing scripts to automate some of our deployment processes, little did I know how this would become an ongoing battle.
And then there was the Facebook announcement about HipHop for PHP. I remember feeling a mix of excitement and concern. On one hand, the performance gains were hard to ignore; on the other, it seemed like another big change we’d need to adapt to. As someone who had been working with PHP long before its days as a server-side language, this felt like yet another step in the evolution.
The tech world was moving so fast that every day brought new challenges and opportunities. We were constantly iterating on our systems, trying to keep up with the pace of change while ensuring we didn’t break anything in the process. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, but it was definitely an exciting time to be a developer.
In this blog post, I’ve tried to capture some of the chaos and excitement that defined 2010 for us. From NoSQL debates to DevOps practices, from arguing over web servers to automating our deployments—each day brought new lessons and challenges. Looking back, it feels like we were living in a time of transition, where everything was up for grabs.
That’s all for today’s reflection. Let me know if you have any thoughts or recollections about those days!
P.S.: I also remember reading a few hacker news stories that day—things like automatically following ex-husbands on Google Buzz and the Facebook announcement about HipHop for PHP. Those were interesting times, indeed!