Favorite Exercise

I don’t like to exercise. I mostly think of it as a distraction, but what bothers me the most is the amount of time spent for exercise could have been dedicated to other, you know, more fun activities. We all need to exercise regularly to stay in shape and be healthy. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that, but if exercise takes too much time, I know I wouldn’t do it. So, I needed a compromise…

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I write because I want to share what I know with others. Yet the software developer in me makes writing hard for me. See, in coding the internal structure needs to be consistent. The code we write is like a house of cards. If we make even one tiny mistake, the whole thing may come falling down. So, when I write, I try to be consistent, which is not a bad thing in itself of course, but the desire for consistency makes writing a lot more difficult for me than it should be…

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First a little context: At Reengen we had been using PostgreSQL on the ext4 file system for a number of years until it recently became evident that the constantly growing database size (over 5 TB at the time) would start to cause issues in general performance, cloud costs, and the ability to have reliable backups. We reviewed a number of alternative file systems, and chose ZFS mainly for its following three features…

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Vendor lock-in: An unfortunate condition that forces a person or company to continue using a disliked product or service just because they invested in it so much. Vendor lock-in used to affect mostly large companies using mission critical legacy applications, but as more and more companies move to the cloud, cloud providers started to rediscover the joys of vendor lock-in by offering “value-added” services that simplify the lives of software developers who have better things in life than managing servers and databases…

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Aycan Gulez