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The following is a series of excerpts from a book by Marianne Bellotti on how to revive and maintain a complex system of software that has been in operational use over a period of time, and has accrued a significant amount of technical and operational debt. Each header before the excerpt is my own or a section title from the book.

Preface "We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." - Ellen Ullman

Introduction

Restoring legacy systems to operational excellence is ultimately about resuscitating an interative development process so that the systems are being maintained and evolving as time goes on...there is little downside to maintaining all systems as if they are legacy systems. It is easy to build things, but it is difficult to rethink them once they are in place. Legacy modernizations are not hard because they are technically hard - the problems and solutions are usually well understood - it's the people side o

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Articles

• The Future of Ops Jobs
• Learn about DevOps
• Getting Started DevOps Links
• Many Shapes of Site Reliability Engineering
• Companies SRE Practices
• Amazon: What is Devops

Videos

• Adopting DevOps? You are aiming at the wrong target!

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• Unusual Ways of Resolving N+1 Queries
  • A great refresher on what N+1 queries are and how to address them. Additionally, provides some less typical, but feasible, ways to fix them.
  • https://pawelurbanek.com/rails-n-1-queries
• Performance Cost of .count
  • Reminder article on the potential pitfalls of using ActiveRecord's .count method
  • https://www.moncefbelyamani.com/the-6-characters-that-could-bring-down-your-rails-app/
• Interview with a founder of resilience engineering
  • Good thoughts on the need for systems to have a high-level of extensibility, the ability to adapt and revise in the face of unanticipated adversity. Also an important note at the end about the balance between optimizing short-term gains with long-term abilities of a system to handle surprise
  • https://increment.com/reliability/resilience-engineering-david-woods/
• Vault, envconsul, k8s, cert-manager interactions gone wrong

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• Interview Question One Person Has Found Insightful to Ask
  • https://des.wtf/whos-the-best-engineer-youve-worked-with/
• Some Rails Monitoring using built-in libraries
  • http://tomrothe.de/posts/dead-simple-rails-monitoring.html
• Dynamic Loading Spinner using CSS only
  • https://dev.to/ruppysuppy/create-dynamic-spinners-only-using-css-34dh
• Detecting Asymmetric Latency using Ping
  • I found the first half of the article more interesting then the second half in terms of teaching me something interesting about ping and what it measures. But as far as why we would need to detect long-term asymmetric latency, the value there was lost on me.
  • https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ping-with-loss-latency-split
• Rails Library for Monitoring N+1 Queries

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Suggested Resources

This a collection of resources meant to serve as an entry point into various tools and technologies. Many of the resources below are awesome Github repos, which are curated lists of resources for a given tool, technology, or concept. These repos are meant as a way to provide information on a variety of topics in a variety of ways in the hopes that you will find resources that best suit your learning style.

Table of Contents

• Ruby
• Rails
• Databases
• Git
• Github
• Docker

ciacci1234

• DB Optimization: Decorrelating Subqueries
  • The first 15-20% of the article was helpful just to learn about what a correlated subquery looks like and it was also interesting to learn that db's handle the execution of correlated queries differently. But the rest of the article was a bit lost on me.
  • https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/materialize-decorrelation/
• Digging Into Things
  • An author's thoughts on the value of digging into the problems that come up while you are trying to solve your main problem.
  • https://jessitron.com/2021/02/27/one-key-trick-to-becoming-a-wizard-developer/
• Game to Teach Functional Programming Ideas
  • I can't speak to the efficacy of this method of communicating FP concepts, but I really liked the visualization and gamification of it all.
  • https://david-peter.de/cube-composer/
• One Dev's Way of Interacting with Twitter More Meaningfully

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• Basics of Webpack for Rails
  • https://blog.appsignal.com/2021/02/17/using-webpacker-in-your-ruby-on-rails-app-deep-dive.html
• Nifty Rails Method: link_to_unless_current
  • https://boringrails.com/tips/rails-link-to-unless-current
• Wrapper around ElasticSearch for enhanced Rails use of ES
  • https://github.com/toptal/chewy
• Interviewer's Thoughts on Asking Specific Code Exercise
  • https://shekhargulati.com/2021/02/18/why-do-software-engineers-struggle-to-write-chunks-function/
• Pentesting Tool
• "HTTP Enumerator"

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• How GCP Ruby team implemented Ruby runtime for Cloud Functions
  • Overview of some of the tradeoffs and design decisions that went into implementing a ruby runtime for Cloud Functions
  • https://daniel-azuma.com/blog/2021/01/20/designing-a-ruby-serverless-runtime
• One Dev's Way of Automating New Machine setup
  • https://alabeduarte.com/new-env-setup/
• Functions-as-a-Service with OpenFaaS
  • Author takes you through their experience using faasd, a project from OpenFaaS, which is an alternative to AWS Lambda functions or GCP Cloud Functions. For the outset of a project, the author is convinced that fassd is more lightweight and easier to experiment with than other solutions out there.
    -https://releasecandidate.dev/posts/2021/discovery-faasd-and-openfaas/
• Suggestions on Doing Successful Migrations
• Thoughts on the need for migrations to manage a company's technical debt as well as providing a loose framework (derisk, enable, finish) for doing migrations.

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• 97 things every SRE should know
  • An author's highlights of the book 97 things an SRE should know.
  • Personally, the highlights were enough for me to want to check out the book.
  • https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/97-things-every-sre-01/
• A Talk on Glue Work
  • Glue work covers much of the work engineering teams need to get done that isn't strictly writing code. This article covers what glue work is and the pros and cons of taking on that type of work.
  • https://noidea.dog/#/glue/
• Coinbase incident writeup
  • This one's about thundering herds and how db components got into a cycle of endlessly requesting more resources 😯
• https://blog.coinbase.com/brief-incident-post-mortem-january-6-7-2021-441f6224da93

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• Cute Nicknames for Common Behaviors during Incidents
  • https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/blog/2020/12/21/incident-phenomena-shorthand-names-a-la-danny-ocean/
• A Dev's Decision to Merge A Chunk of Microservices back into a Monolith
  • Most useful takeaway: "Micro"-services was not a great name for the modern pattern of splitting up services into smaller chunks. The author instead proposes "right-sized" services to convey a more dynamic, evolving approach to drawing boundaries between the different services within a given system.
  • https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3944-why-ive-been-merging-microservices-back-into-the-monolith-at-invision.htm
• Framing SLO's for Directors At Your Company
  • https://medium.com/brexeng/how-to-sell-slos-to-engineering-directors-9c6379c3f246
• Lots of Good Stuff about the Importance of Documentation from an SRE perspective
  • https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3283589
• Dropbox Insights on Incident Management