Tech
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
Tech
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
Tech
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
Tech
We've always known Google Analytics would be susceptible to anti-tracking extensions like AdBlock [https://getadblock.com/] and uBlock Origin [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock]. I never really thought about how big that difference would be. It was only when we started using Cloudflare on Nomad List [https://nomadlist.
Tech
My blog is generated by Jekyll and hosted on a Linode VPS. This is how I set up Git to allow me to instantly deploy updates. My setup has gone through a few iterations over the years, as I changed technologies and tried to make it easier. I used to
Tech
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
Tech
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
Tech
A couple of months ago I created Server Help [https://t.me/server_help], a Telegram group to help indie makers with any server issues. It's not a big group but people come to ask questions they have about DNS, web server configurations and hosting services. I started
Tech
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&
Tech
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
Tech
We have a weird rise in incoming IPv6 traffic for 12 hours a day between 1900 and 0700 UTC. It's an almost sudden rise so it doesn't seem to be due to a certain geographic region waking up. According to tcpdump, it is directed at port
Tech
This post is about how we monitor Nomad List [https://nomadlist.com], Remote OK [https://remoteok.io] and others. Over the years, Pieter [https://twitter.com/levelsio] and I have built up a set of tools to run and inform us when the sites may be experiencing an issue. Cron