Space City Weather post mortem
Sep. 7th, 2017 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI read a really great article at Ars Technica.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/how-to-hurricane-proof-a-web-server/
Basically, a weather blog that normally doesn't get a ton of traffic but has an IT guy who likes to tinker in a particular direction (that is, his tinkering is aimed at awful-thing-happening-proofing -- not at maximizing features) did A-OK during Harvey.
This article is great in many ways. First, it is a really engagingly written technical piece. I'm sufficiently out of date that I mostly know Varnish from error messages on blog platforms. Etc. But I grasp the basics -- I understand how encryption interacts with caching, I understand about running out of ports, etc. And anyone who has been to my Very Old Fashioned website knows that I am a huge believer in simple and static. I _like_ how he chose to do things, and I enjoyed reading about the details (especially CloudFlare, and what AMP can do for a small website that gets a lot of traffic). Second, Hutchinson includes the very human aspect of riding out a storm. I love storms. I'm sensible enough to try to avoid them, but I've been through a few and my future holds more. Before I had kids, I used to do stupid shit like go hiking during a tornado watch, or go have a meal at the Space Needle in hopes they'd shut the elevator down and trap me there while a storm rolled in over Elliot Bay. I love stories of people riding out storms. The emotions, the feels. I am there for it. Third, Hutchinson does a pretty compelling job of depicting something that I value enormously, even tho I'm not clear that he understands it. He seems to have a sense that the combination of his preference for site design -- his tinkering orientation, shall we say -- was sort of lucky in this case. And it is. In the very Victorian sense of Making One's Own Luck.
If you know anyone who does slightly weird shit that pays off way more often than seems likely, you probably know someone like Hutchinson. And I love stories about those kinds of people.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/how-to-hurricane-proof-a-web-server/
Basically, a weather blog that normally doesn't get a ton of traffic but has an IT guy who likes to tinker in a particular direction (that is, his tinkering is aimed at awful-thing-happening-proofing -- not at maximizing features) did A-OK during Harvey.
This article is great in many ways. First, it is a really engagingly written technical piece. I'm sufficiently out of date that I mostly know Varnish from error messages on blog platforms. Etc. But I grasp the basics -- I understand how encryption interacts with caching, I understand about running out of ports, etc. And anyone who has been to my Very Old Fashioned website knows that I am a huge believer in simple and static. I _like_ how he chose to do things, and I enjoyed reading about the details (especially CloudFlare, and what AMP can do for a small website that gets a lot of traffic). Second, Hutchinson includes the very human aspect of riding out a storm. I love storms. I'm sensible enough to try to avoid them, but I've been through a few and my future holds more. Before I had kids, I used to do stupid shit like go hiking during a tornado watch, or go have a meal at the Space Needle in hopes they'd shut the elevator down and trap me there while a storm rolled in over Elliot Bay. I love stories of people riding out storms. The emotions, the feels. I am there for it. Third, Hutchinson does a pretty compelling job of depicting something that I value enormously, even tho I'm not clear that he understands it. He seems to have a sense that the combination of his preference for site design -- his tinkering orientation, shall we say -- was sort of lucky in this case. And it is. In the very Victorian sense of Making One's Own Luck.
If you know anyone who does slightly weird shit that pays off way more often than seems likely, you probably know someone like Hutchinson. And I love stories about those kinds of people.