Today I found myself needing to use the comm utility to compare two 20GB files. This ended up taking about 10 minutes and while it was running I got curious at how much time was left. Knowing that comm must read through both files before it finishes, I decided to see if I could build a simple progress indicator based on the read offset of one of it’s file descriptors.

Bash is a wonderful and terrible language. It can provide extremely elegant solutions to common text processing and system management tasks, but it can also drag you into the depths of convoluted workarounds to accomplish menial jobs.

I recently got interested in supporting Heroku style push deployments in the AWS stack at Fullscreen, Inc. There are a few solutions for this in the wild like Dokku, but I wanted to use something flexible enough to grow with our deployment infrastructure that wasn’t dependent on container technology. The solution I came up with involves a deploy server, a Git hook and a bit of Bash.

The internet is rife with promises of 100% availability when using HAProxy for load balancing. THEY ARE LIES!

The git commit log is one of the best tools for understanding the history and direction of a project. I’ve found there are a ton of situations where the log can make complex interactions with a repo a breeze.