On July 3rd, I decided I was taking a break from social media. I deleted Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat from my iPhone, iPad and removed any links to them in my browser (I didn’t delete my profiles). A full month seemed like a good amount of time to detox from all of these and see what would change in my life without them. The first couple of days I was certainly fidgety, kept looking down at my phone and not knowing what to do with it. »

Over the last 9 years, I’ve had a few things in my life that have benefited me both professionally and personally that have all tied back to Flickr. In 2003, Canon had released the first sub-$1000 digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS 300D aka the EOS Digital Rebel. The 300D paved the way for entry level consumers to get involved with the world of digital SLRs, previously the cheapest option was the Canon 10D, available at $2,000. »

For a hack week project at Chartbeat, I hooked my Philip’s Hue light bulbs into PagerDuty so whenever I get paged my lights will start flashing. Read about the hack over on the PagerDuty blog »

I wrote a couple blog posts for work diving into what we learned optimizing our performance in EC2. You can read both parts over at http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2014/01/02/part-1-lessons-learned-tuning-tcp-and-nginx-in-ec2/ and http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2014/02/12/part-2-lessons-learned-tuning-tcp-and-nginx-in-ec2/ »

command[check_recent_core]=PLUGINPATH/check_recent_core.sh --file="$ARG1" --freshness=$ARG2$ Spot the error? I only wasted an hour of my life and another 30 minutes of co-workers trying to figure out why I kept getting a "NRPE: No output returned from plugin" error in Nagios. The issue? $ARG1 is missing a closing “$”. *slams head on desk* »