juangacovas

Less than a day for disaster recovery on fresh hardware? Same as my case. As you say, good enough for most purposes, but I'm also looking for improvement. I have offsite realtime replicas for data and mariaDBs, and offsite nightly backups (combo of rsnapshot, lsyncd, mariaDB multi-source replication, and a post-new-install script that setups almost everything in case you have to recover on bare-metal, i.e. no available VM snapshots).

Currently trying to reduce that "less than a day" though. Recently discovered "ReaR" (Relax and Recover) from RedHat and sounds really nice for bare-metal servers. Not everybody runs on virtualized/cloud (being able to recover from VM snapshots is really a plus). Let's share experiencies :)

I think the spirit of the article is: you should be able to "download real data from yesterday until now", and be able to run the system locally (or in a stage server wherever). Sure, with some mocks or not, but that's super convenient for testing, debugging, etc. without having to risk nasty "write tests" in production

"lsyncd" is really good for efficient, continuous sync. If you have password-less, public-key SSH auth, lsyncd is a bless (using it for millions of files and folders and doing good)

>Using something that already exists that does 80% of what you need it to do, is normally a better win then writing something from scratch that does 100%. That 80% might even be too high - the real number could be as low as 50% or even 10%.

I agree, but I'd say that sometimes could be good to write that 10-50% from scratch, maybe for a bunch of reasons.

Anyone can compare the "externals" in SVN with "submodules" in git? I'm curious since I'm used to externals in SVN and they're ok but as always you have to keep some things in mind

So you want to be a wizard? by Julia Evans is a nice "zine" of her. https://wizardzines.com/zines/wizard/

Sometimes I would like to tell my programmer teammates to "imagine if you were the computer, what would be faster to do", when it comes to think about optimizing a process or something like that.

You can found it also in a tetrabrik soup brand from Spain: https://www.google.com/search?q=caldos+aneto&sxsrf=ALeKk02rt...

They talk about that on readme/manual

I see, my mistake!

As others pointed, the best thing you can do is learn to debug PHP interactively with an IDE (easier locally) so you can step, REPL and so on, into a mess of a code to improve it

This is still possible, how do you think isn't anymore? As example I mean

I'd help, but don't know what programming language should be used.

Even more, the ultimate geek will run those Sierra and Lucasarts games on ScummVM (or DOSBox) using Roland MT-32 emulation for enhanced music! (research on forums or Youtube). Pretty neat

Thanks, in my case that directory didn't exist until I lookup how to properly start ssh-agent under windows

I have team members that run on Windows, using private-public keys with Putty and Pageant for passphrases. When you read "put the third certificate" under ".ssh" directory, how would you do it on windows?

Pájaro viejo no entra en jaula (Spanish for "Senior bird doesn't enter cages")

I remember World of Warcraft using the bittorrent protocol internally to distribute updates, which was an smart use at that moment considering the horde of people downloading at the same time.

I update some CentOS servers with ML kernel from ElRepo.org, and no problems for four years, but my stack could be minimalist (webservers) and do just fine

I worked for years on client and content side of a medium size MMO, closely with a colleague who was in charge for server side. It was successful in the sense of people paying a monthly subscription fee for playing.

Every time someone asks me for advice in this field, I just tell this: make a prototype of a very simple game (cards, board...) where you have a limited number of players. Take care of anyone wanting to cheat (i.e. sending crafted packets) pretending to have a service where your users value fairness and no cheaters.

Why? Because once you do that 99% well enough for a simple game, you realize the huge amount of work it takes for games of other sizes.

Welcome

If you're having a hard time with Visual C++ Redist. packages on Windows for WAMP, just try the packages on page bottom here: http://wampserver.aviatechno.net/?lang=en

> it's your job to seek high quality feedback from whoever you can find

Agree. Not always of high quality, but also for "reality check". For example, you'll have to write a feedback tool yourself (i.e. for a B2B, private software that hundreds of people can use daily), so you get how the users value the product (typical star system with optional comments, etc).

You end doing real, production work on some codebase that uses Smarty. You grasp why. Your next PHP project uses Smarty because you learnt some good things about it. Always balance the pros and cons. Until real world work is done, almost all hate is based on judgement done in blog posts.

So there are no debuggers, just untodoers...

Look for imapsync on other comments

Another happy user of imapsync. The best thing IMO is that you can stop/get disconnected for some reason and it will effectively SYNC, without having to praise just to complete without errors

This is the way, but connecting to production database is not always an option.

Let's say there is a problem when adding some type of record... You want to avoid, if possible, the creation of "test" records in production while reproducing the bug.

That's why I think we all end having some sort of inhouse tool that grabs a full snapshot of the database, or if not possible because of really big databases, just a sufficient dump of relevant data for the bug at hand (ie. just rows from some date, just some "customer" data, etc. to be able to mostly mimic the data environment).

Do whatever is needed to do your job: squash the bug. To do it you need to be able to reproduce it NOT in production (or you're lost in guess-temptative-fixes in production).

Two million rows in tables are not a problem even for old databases (I'm thinking of mysql 5.1)... Are you confident on your indexes, normalization, etc?

Basic bit and byte knowledge, like some other "foundation" stuff. Basically, that everything in computers are numbers under the hood.

A bunch of things I can just think where the bit and byte stuff has helped me:

- Database structures: smaller is usually faster, and you save storage. If you know a column can only store numbers from 0 to 16, make it TINYINT UNSIGNED (one byte, 8 bits) instead of 4 bytes (32 bits). Think of x4 storage gain, think when you have hundred of thousands of rows...

- Encoding stuff: learn some hexadecimal to be able to scratch your head around the bytes of anything instead of being blind about it.

- For critical or limited storage (or making smaller packets/transfers), you can use "bit masks". Instead of using 8 bytes for 8 flags, you can use just one byte (8 bits) and just "flag" each bit of it.

Etc.