Anatomy of Graceful Shutdown: Part 1

Part 1: Signals and Linux Part 1: Signals and Linux [you’re here] Part 2: Containers and signals Part 3: Graceful shutdown of K8S pods Part 4: Celery Graceful Shutdown Part 5: Prometheus Graceful Shutdown Part 6: Other frameworks and libraries [WIP] Intro There’s been quite a lot of issues surrounding application shutdowns in my line of work. Connections not being correctly closed, incoming requests being processed when they shouldn’t have been, various quirks around how new deployments affect customers during busy hours. I’ve decided to familiarize myself more with the topic and that’s quite a lot going on there. ...

March 3, 2024 · 25 min · 5230 words · Andrei Sviridov

Blog Updates: 19.02.2024

It’s not been quite long enough since I’ve wrote my first article about blog deployment and I already to change quite a lot. OrangePI 5 is not stable enough At first, the idea of doing a reliable, always accessible website on the small computer under your TV was stupid. I’ve stumbled upon the power management issues with my USB-attached SSD drive. All of a sudden filesystem became read-only and the whole infrastructure went south. Static deployments were unavailable, as well as analytics. I had to swap the USB-drive in favour of the M2 small NVMe which made the system a lot stabler but still, too unpredictable. ...

February 19, 2024 · 2 min · 306 words · Andrei Sviridov

Book Review: Are Your Lights On

Somewhere on the vast landlines of X (former Twitter), I stumbled upon the recommendation of this book. It had a funny cover and a word of advice from some quite reputable, so I had no other way but to read it. The book’s central theme is practical problem-solving in human-built systems with some possible biases and sometimes irrational behaviors. By a set of reality-based examples, full of humor, we’re driven through a journey addressing the core of problem-solving: what it is the real problem to solve and whether it should be solved in general. ...

February 11, 2024 · 2 min · 418 words · Andrei Sviridov

Book Review: Broadcast by Liam Brown

Recently, I’ve been looking for some fiction to read to pass the time and relax a bit from the thoughts swarming in my head. I read fiction quite rarely, as, you know, I’m a ‘productive’ person . I’ve been looking for something easy to swallow yet relatable, so I’ve searched for some softcore sci-fi in a modern setting. Browsing through some top-tens lists, I’ve found the Broadcast written by Liam Brown. The premise looks simple: David, a YouTube vlogger, gets an offer from a crazy technical prodigy to implant a chip that will broadcast rare thoughts to the outside world. Easy money, easy fame. As you may expect, the story goes full-blown HUMANCENTiPAD pretty quick (no spoilers). ...

February 5, 2024 · 2 min · 312 words · Andrei Sviridov

My Productivity System Search Failure: Lather, Rinse, Repeat

A soundtrack to accompany your reading: Spotify TLDR; Search for the ultimate productivity system is bogus. Better time management is possible, but the most beneficial is having a consistent outlook on one’s goals and desires and maintaining a stable energy level. Any task list + calendar covers a lot. Disclaimer The post above is just a personal story, not a manual to action. I (at the moment) don’t have critical areas in my life, such as children. I’m not a content creator. A regular software engineer with regular hobbies. Not a person with a critical mission and a need for some extraordinary, reliable personal management system. Consider it a psychotherapeutic emotional outburst. ...

January 28, 2024 · 10 min · 2004 words · Andrei Sviridov

How I prefer conducting code-reviews

Here’s a Spotify album to accompany your reading: Tamino - Amir. Disclaimer And below is my framework for conducting code reviews within a large product-oriented software company. I do not intend this to be used as a universal guide by anyone, as situations, companies, and software differ. Most likely reviews in mission-critical software and a new young start-up look different. Consider this as another opportunity to look at what happens inside another person’s head. ...

January 20, 2024 · 8 min · 1515 words · Andrei Sviridov

Python Multiprocessing Quirks on MacOS.

Prelude Currently, I’m working on the product, built around a large Django monolithic application and a bunch of microservices around it. The codebase is quite huge and has a lot of (tens of thousands) tests, that are normally run in a parallel mode in the CI environment. The CPython and Django versions are a little bit stale (3.8 and 3.2 respectively). For local development purposes, it’s well enough to run a subset of tests in a non-parallel mode or to wait for the whole suite to pass during the CI run, but for one specific use case I had to run a parallel test suite locally. It was a surprise for me to see the Segmentation Fault as the test failure reason for a bunch of tests. ...

January 14, 2024 · 8 min · 1639 words · Andrei Sviridov

I Don't Like Paper Books

New purchase Recently I’ve purchased a paper book. I did it only because I was really eager to read that specific book (here it is). The content was good, and I will definitely make a short review afterward, but the process of reading a physical book was quite painful to me. Ooops, here goes the nostalgia I’ve spent quite a lot of time in my childhood and adolescence reading books. There was a library on the ground floor of the house I lived in and it had been an endless source of information and entertainment before the internet came to my life. ...

January 7, 2024 · 5 min · 944 words · Andrei Sviridov

How to With John Wilson: a must-watch series.

If you’re looking for a way to spend several evenings I have something to recommend to you. There’s an awesome TV-series slash documentary on HBO called How To With John Wilson. The premise is quite simple: the narrator asks the question “How to do X”, for example, “How to make small talk?” and goes to the in-breadth exploration of the topic, meeting various people, getting into all sorts of bizarre situations and acquaintances. ...

January 4, 2024 · 2 min · 224 words · Andrei Sviridov

Learning music and the guitar as the never-ending failure.

TLDR; I’ve spent 10 years trying to become good at guitar and music, failed at it almost completely, and now give a last chance before understanding, that the whole stuff is just not my cup of tea. Preface I strongly believe that people nowadays do not share enough the ways they fail in life. Everywhere you look you will see the history of success, social media feeds will make you feel bad for sitting the evenings in front of your TV watching that new anime series. ...

January 1, 2024 · 11 min · 2329 words · Andrei Sviridov