Daniel Lockyer

Twenty-nine

Following on from my previous posts for my twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth birthdays, here is my recap of my twenty-ninth year on Earth. In the last year, I have: * come 2nd place in the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 50km * visited Vuurtoreneiland for Sanne's birthday * been to

How to resend all failed Stripe webhooks

If you've had issues with your webhook endpoint, and Stripe failed to send webhooks to you, it'll automatically retry with an exponential backoff. However, you might want to manually trigger the events to be resent before the automatic attempt. Stripe allows you to do this via

Running goals for 2024

* 5km: 17:00 (3:24 min/km) * 10km: 36:00 (3:36 min/km) ✅ * Half marathon: 1:20:00 (3:47 min/km) * Marathon: 2:45:00 (3:55 min/km)

Twenty-eight

Following on from my previous posts for my twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh birthdays, here is my recap of my twenty-eighth year on Earth. In the last year, I have: * spent Christmas + New Year in the Netherlands * been to Spain * received a Netherlands residency permit * moved to an apartment

Running goals for 2023

* 5km: 18:30 (3:42 min/km) → ✅ 17:44 (3:33 min/km) * 10km: 39:00 (3:54 min/km) → ✅ 36:55 (3:42 min/km) * Half marathon: 1:25:00 (4:02 min/km) → ✅ 1:21:30 (3:52 min/km) * Marathon: 2:59:59 (4:16 min/km)

Twenty-seven

Following on from my previous posts for my twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth birthdays, here is my recap of my twenty-seventh year on Earth. In the last year, I have: * lived in numerous countries and apartments * ran Ashby 20 (miles) in March * ran 31km for Sanne's birthday in

Running targets for 2022

A clone of my targets for 2020 because I haven't achieved them yet. * 5km: 18:30 (3:42 min/km) * 10km: 39:00 (3:54 min/km) * Half marathon: 1:25:00 (4:02 min/km) * Marathon: 2:59:59 (4:16 min/km)

Twenty-six

Following on from my previous posts for my twenty-third [https://daniellockyer.com/twenty-three/], twenty-fourth [https://daniellockyer.com/twenty-four/] and twenty-fifth [https://daniellockyer.com/twenty-five/] birthdays, here is my recap of my twenty-sixth year on Earth. In the last year, I have: * lived in York, UK for 1 year * ran a

My first 100km run

It's been long since I did this run and I originally wrote the bulk of this post in the week after, but recovery was tough and I lost the drive to continue writing after a couple of weeks. Having looked at this draft every time I log in,

Twenty-five

I've previously written my year-in-review for my twenty-third [https://daniellockyer.com/twenty-three] and twenty-fourth [https://daniellockyer.com/twenty-four/] birthdays. And now for another! As well all know, this year has been a weird one. Things didn't go as expected for many but I've tried

Find the largest unstaged files in Git

I was recently adding a bunch of files to a new Git repo, but I couldn't be sure if I was about to commit a 100MB file. The following bash command should print out a sorted list of unstaged files and their size, so you can check if

How to solve low 4iiii Precision power meter readings

I recently managed to get a 4iiii Precision left-only crank power meter. I fitted it and did a 40 minute indoor session. I have a dumb trainer, but I've found the power curve online. It was showing that I could expect ~200W for 30km/h on a certain

Zone 2 training

I spent most of 2017 and 2018 running with little structure or knowledge of pacing. When I first started, I kept trying to PB my 5km time literally every single run. A lot of my time was spent injured from ramping up too quickly, and running too quickly. I bought

Running targets for 2020

As of October 31st 2019, my current running PBs are the following: * 5km: 19:49 (3:58 min/km - November 2018) * 10km: 42:13 (4:13 min/km - October 2019) * Half marathon: 1:30:17 (4:17 min/km - October 2019) * Marathon (unofficial): 3:39:46 (5:

Twenty-four

Last year I wrote a year-in-review for my twenty-third [https://daniellockyer.com/twenty-three] birthday. And now it's time for another! In the last year, I have: * visited Chiang Mai - Here for my birthday last year, until just after NYD. Came back here during summer to regain fitness

Node.js memory flamegraphs

If you read my blog or follow me on Twitter you may have noticed I'm a huge fan of flamegraphs. I've previously written about how I use them to profile PHP [https://daniellockyer.com/php-flame-graphs/] and Node.js [https://daniellockyer.com/profiling-nodejs/] applications, and I help

If you are still using PHP 5.6 or 7.0, you need to upgrade

Last October I made Upgrade your PHP [https://upgradeyourphp.com/], a site to let people know that PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 were about to reach their End of Life, and would no longer be officially supported. In the time since, I've been helping people upgrade

Profiling Node.js applications using flamegraphs

This post is a case study of how I profiled a Node.js application, and how using flamegraphs allowed me to make the boot time of Ghost 20% faster. I remember trying to profile Node.js many years ago and it was much harder than it is now. When researching

DigitalOcean Spaces doesn't support HTTP/2

Earlier today I was looking at a couple of sites to see why they were much slower than I expected. I ran them through GTmetrix and saw the following in the waterfall tab. Straightaway I could see that this is the classic pattern produced by trying to load a bunch

Flamegraphs for Ruby 2.6

I recently added support for Ruby 2.5.4, 2.5.5 and 2.6.0-2.6.3 to rbspy, the sampling profiler written in Rust. I have replaced the original Flamegraph library by Brendan Gregg with Inferno, a Rust port. I also updated and merged a PR for handling

Linode corrupted our server and how I got it back up

A few days ago, the server running Nomad List [https://nomadlist.com] and Remote OK [https://remoteok.io] randomly went down. This is the timeline of what happened and how I fixed it. All times are in  Korean Standard Time. 21:05 Pieter [https://twitter.com/levelsio] starts messaging me

Rewriting stackcollapse-xdebug in Rust

A week or so ago, I saw the inferno [https://github.com/jonhoo/inferno] project mentioned on the Rust subreddit. It was a rewrite of the great FlameGraph [https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph] library into Rust. All of the work was being livestreamed by Jon Gjengset [https://twitter.com/Jonhoo/

Red flags in website performance

When a client asks me to take a look at their site, I start off by throwing it into a bunch of services to analyze the performance. One of my favorites is GTmetrix [https://gtmetrix.com] because it has a lot of useful metrics and visualizations. The most useful one

Project: Cron Heatmap

Towards the end of last year I made Cron Heatmap [https://cronheatmap.com], a website to visualize your cron jobs and help you find hotspots. The motivation from the project comes from my work over at Nomad List [https://nomadlist.com] and Remote OK [https://remoteok.io]. There are over

How a software upgrade can make you more money

My work involves clients coming to me looking for a server tune-up. One of the things I can do is to look at the software they're currently running and look at upgrading it to the latest version. A common example here is PHP. I often see people still

Day one in Kuala Lumpur

After arriving in KL [https://daniellockyer.com/flying-to-kuala-lumpur/], I spent the rest of the day wandering around trying to get some bearings. I had randomly booked a hotel 5 minutes away from KL Sentral, the train station you arrive at when you come from the airport. The Fajr prayer call

New Year's Eve 2018

NYE is normally a quiet time for me. This year I went for dinner with a friend in Chiang Mai and then proceeded to head home. A couple of hours later, another friend said they were all heading out to Tha Phae on the east side of Old City to

Flying to Kuala Lumpur

After 2 months in Thailand, my visa was up so I had to move on to another country. I was originally looking at going to Bali, Indonesia but the recent tsunami on a neighbouring island, and their general lack of a tsunami warning system made me a little hesitant to

Back in Chiang Mai

After running my 5km race in Phuket [https://daniellockyer.com/laguna-phuket-5k/] and flying to Bangkok to meet Jet [https://jetholt.com/exploring-bangkok/], I took the train to Chiang Mai for the second time. I tried to fix some of the issues with the journey I experienced last time but I

Quickly debugging server issues

Part of my job as a server consultant is maintaining servers and quickly responding to issues as they arise. Yesterday, I unlocked my phone to find a message from a client. He said Apache was getting railed and the server load was over 80. I quickly opened my laptop and

Exercise cured my asthma

I lived with asthma for most of my life but when I started exercising, I was cured. Note: I am not a medical professional. Don't do anything stupid. I was diagnosed with asthma at 18 months old. I'm not quite sure of the details but apparently

Hiking into 2562

Happy New Year from Thailand! To kick off the New Year, the Chiang Mai WIP gang hiked up to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep. I suggested going up Pilgrim's Trail -- having only completed around half of it on my last trip here. We started around 0900. There

Running 250km in a month

At some point after I publish this blog post, I'm going to go out for a run and tick over 250km for the month. This is the most I've ever ran and it's not a lot, but it's a good step to

Visa extension in Chiang Mai

I recently had to extend my 30 day visa exemption by another 30 days. Last time I was here, I went to Promenada mall on the south east side of Chiang Mai. As of September 2018, Promenada mall immigration office closed down and replaced with one by the airport. It&

Hiding your Linode server IP with Cloudflare

Over at Nomad List [https://nomadlist.com] and Remote OK [https://remoteok.io], we recently switched our server IP to protect against DDoS attacks. Whilst the main sites had been on Cloudflare for a couple of months, the server IP was easily findable on Google and we had experienced several

Twenty-three

Today is my 23rd birthday. It's a good time to reflect on the things that have happened in the last year. Anyone who knows me well knows I don't like to celebrate my birthday. I tend to just go out and eat a meal with friends,

Creating a PHP response time dashboard

Following my previous post about creating histograms from PHP response times [https://daniellockyer.com/php-response-time-histograms/], I made a small dashboard so I could see those histograms across each site. It was fairly simple to make -- I just looped over the last 50000 lines in the log file, checked if

Overnight in DMK

In order to get from Da Nang to Phuket, I had two options: arrive late at night or sleep in the airport. The first option would have gotten me to Phuket Airport at 22:30, which wasn't ideal and made getting to a hotel at a reasonable time

Generating response time histograms for PHP

Whilst debugging an issue related to response times on Nomad List [https://nomadlist.com] and Remote OK [https://remoteok.io], I started to think about what kind of data we have available to analyse. We keep access logs for all requests coming through the PHP-FPM engine. I briefly wrote about

Spectating the Laguna Phuket Triathlon

Aside from seeing Phuket, I went there to spectate the Laguna Phuket Triathlon. The day before I ran the charity 5km fun run [https://daniellockyer.com/laguna-phuket-5k/] so I was in a good mood and excited to see the triathlon. It was the 25th year and they had a sprint

Narrowly avoiding theft

This is a little story about an experience I had in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam nearly 2 months ago. It's not meant to provoke fear about travelling but I think there are some important lessons to be taken away. I was staying in a hostel in the

On owning little

> "Is that all you own?" I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked that question. My parents, family, friends, people in hostels, receptionists in hotels and airport attendants have all asked me that question. They are amazed at the size

A good experience with Saucony

My first running shoes were a pair of Saucony Ride 10. They had treated me well, getting me through Paris marathon [https://daniellockyer.com/paris-marathon/] and my 52km ultramarathon [https://daniellockyer.com/team-chapter-ultra-52/]. In June, I noticed that the mesh-like outer fabric was starting to split. Over the next few

Upgrade your PHP

At the end of 2018, PHP 5.6 and 7.0 will reach their end-of-life status and no longer receive future security updates. That means it's time to upgrade your PHP. On October 22nd, I came up with the idea of creating a microsite to bring awareness to

Flying to Da Nang

It probably seems I'm moving around too quickly. I only spent 5 days in Ho Chi Minh City and then I left again. However, I think it's important I find out what kind of place I like before slowing down and dedicating myself to living in

Day Two in Ho Chi Minh City

(Technically it's my third day but I arrived late on the first night so I'm not counting it.) I woke up early because I was meant to check out of my hostel but wanted to extend it for another few days. Whilst researching for places to

Walking around Ho Chi Minh City

I figured for my first day in Ho Chi Minh City I should go for a walk around and see some of the touristy places. I had a map from my hostel so I came up with my own tour. From District 1, I head east towards the river and

Flying to Ho Chi Minh City

After two months in Thailand, my visa was up so I semi-randomly chose to go to Ho Chi Minh City. HCMC is highly rated [https://nomadlist.com/ho-chi-minh-city] on Nomad List and only a 2 hour flight from Chiang Mai so it seemed like a good choice. My last day

Running in Chiang Mai is really cool

Note: Chiang Mai is not a cold place, it's 33C in the day and 24C at night. But heat acclimation [http://fellrnr.com/wiki/Heat_Acclimation_Training] is a good thing. My running whilst I was in Chiang Mai consisted of two different types: track work and long

How to generate PHP Flamegraphs

In my quest to optimise the PHP sites I work on, I found that the Flame Graph repository contains a script to convert XDebug traces. Flame graphs, created by Brendan Gregg, visualize the most frequently hit code from profiled software. The x-axis represents the profiled stack traces, ordered alphabetically, and

Analyzing my university marks

I recently finished 4 years at the University of Southampton, studying MEng Computer Science. I kept a spreadsheet recording all my university marks and this post briefly looks into some of my numbers. The weighting for my degree was 20% for 2nd year and 40% for 3rd and 4th year.

Getting the train to Chiang Mai

A couple of weeks after going to Bangkok, I decided to move on towards Chiang Mai. I had seen YouTube videos and blogs describing the experience and I thought it looked great. My friend also decided to come along so it was nice to share the experience with someone. The

Arriving in Bangkok for the first time

My flight from Heathrow to Cologne was over before I even had a chance to get my headphones out. I've never taken such a short flight before so it was quite weird to be landing within an hour. Maybe I should have done more research but my plan

How to find slow PHP scripts

It is important to keep a website fast so users have a good experience. Some pages on your website may be slower than others, possibly due to slow backend code. I use this super simple method to find the slowest loading PHP scripts and fix them. {: .center-image } Remember, you can&

Dispatched

Yesterday I left my hometown of Nuneaton, UK to begin my journey to South-East Asia. I had breakfast with my family and said goodbye to my grandparents. I collected my bag and my dad took me to the train station. It was quite emotional leaving everyone -- not knowing when

Going up Teide

Whilst on holiday in Tenerife, my brother and I took an organised trip up the volcano Teide. We stopped at a café in Villaflor to get food and so people could buy cable car tickets. Despite the fact that most of the sea-level landscape on Tenerife is barren and desert-like,

Graduation

On July 19th 2018 I graduated from the University of Southampton with First Class Honours in MEng Computer Science.

Fuzzing Rust

I spent some time fuzzing various Rust fuzzing tools against Rust libraries. This table is a list of all the issues I found and links to my bug report. DateProjectDescriptionLink2017-03-13ntp [https://github.com/JeffBelgum/ntp]Fix panic caused by a malformed inputPR [https://github.com/JeffBelgum/ntp/pull/1] 2017-03-23npy-rs

The next two months

I am writing this post with just over a week left living in my house in Southampton, UK. I finished my university exams at the end of May and I've been living in this city for 4 years. It's been a crazy time but it seems

Automating gym bookings

My gym uses an online system to take gym class bookings. People often book way in advance and then cancel on the day. There's no waiting list so if you want to grab a last minute spot, you have to be lucky enough to try and book in

Paris trip

In April 2018 I travelled to Paris to take part in the marathon. I went with my uncle and 2 family friends who are in my triathlon group. Three of us were running, with the fourth recovering from knee surgery. I will write a specific post on the marathon soon.

Scuba diving

In 2014 I went on holiday to Fuerteventura with my then girlfriend. The start of the holiday wasn't great as we were put in a different hotel to that which we had paid for. The food was unbelievably bad, and we had noisy neighbours arguing until the early

Earth Today

This is a self-updating feed from DSCOVR. I love this set of images. It is amazing to think that this entire world we live in is contained within that small globe you see on the screen. Images from (loading).

How I started programming

I learned to program in June 2011, at the age of 15, during my summer holidays. I had just finished my penultimate year of high school and wanted to learn something to do with my interest of computers. I think that was also when I decided I wanted to study

Experimenting with no duvet

Over the last 2 months I have been experimenting with getting rid of my duvet for sleeping. I'd been thinking about it for a while and decided to trial sleeping with a blanket. A few days ago I deemed the experiment a success and got rid of my

Levi Ben Gershon theorem

The following theorem is taken from Levi Ben Gershon's manuscript Maaseh Hoshev (The Art of Calculation), 1321. When you add consecutive numbers starting with 1, and the number of numbers you add is odd, the result is equal to the product of the middle number among them times

StreASM

As part of our project for Programming Language Concepts [https://www.southampton.ac.uk/courses/modules/comp2212.page] at the University of Southampton [https://www.southampton.ac.uk/], Jet Holt [https://jetholt.com/] and I made StreASM [https://github.com/daniellockyer/StreASM], a stream processing language based upon Assembly. You

Cooperative coevolution typo

Whilst re-implementing the paper "A Cooperative Coevolutionary Approach to Function Optimization" by Mitchell Potter and Kenneth De Jong for a Computer Science assignment, I noticed a typo in one of the benchmark functions. In the paper, the Schwefel function is listed on page 5 as $$f(x) = 418.

How to profile your PHP apps

Part of my job at Nomad List [https://nomadlist.com], Remote OK [https://remoteok.io] et al. is to keep the sites fast and responsive, even from an influx of traffic to Pieter's [https://twitter.com/levelsio] latest app. Launches are usually kept controlled by exporting the pages