Posts

While I haven’t taken the time to blog since the Ksunami announcement, I have been ploughing away at various projects inside the Kafkesc organization, and also continuing the side-objective of growing my Rust skills. So, here is a recap of a few things I have released since. And also, how is it leading to a substantial growth in my Rust knowledge. Ksunami gets an official Docker image In an attempt to make adoption easier, I setup ksunami-docker so that running ksunami can be ever easier; in Docker, Kubernetes or wherever you need. For example: ...

October this year, while I was in the process of changing job, I started working on an open source project to monitor Kafka consumer lag. At New Relic, a previous gig, we used a lot of Kafka, and we cared equally about monitoring its usage: there are some great articles on New Relic own blogs, published over the years. In the process, I realised that I needed a way to spin up a Kafka cluster for development, and I needed a producer of Kafka records, that was able to behave in accordance to specific scenarios. ...

Gimme the TL;DR A new Terraform provider is available, designed to interact with ZooKeeper ZNodes: TFZK. The latest stable version is v1.0.3, and you should give it a go. Ah! And here is the doc. OK, I got more time - go ahead! Earlier this year I decided to scratch a long-standing itch: build a Terraform Provider for Apache ZooKeeper. While there was already one, it came with limitations that created issues in production environments: ...

Yet another take on expensive housing. I’m not sure I fully agree with the idea that poor aesthetic (actually, ugliness) has a dominating role in the pricing bubble. I still believe the the biggest issue is with political choices, that most probably are driven by lobbist interests. Nevertheless this video is an interesting and watch-worth perspective. After watching this video I subscribed to “The School of Life” channel. And frankly you should too.

Britain, you have a problem: house prices in the East/South East have grown ridiculous. See 2014 house pricing data by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that compares prices with the pre-crisis ones. +31.6!?!?!?! We all know that UK is very much London centered, and this is reflected in the graph above. The government doesn’t shy away from policy that are openly “pro-London” and while there are complaints, as an immigrant since 2007, I can see not much more than some “grumpiness” about it. It’s like Britons are “sort of ok with it”. ...

Moses didn’t know what to do any more with those idiots. So he decides to go out for a wander. The pressure was too much. He knew that, sooner or later, they will just crash his skull with a stone. He needed a plan. He needed a way to survive (both him and them!), without ruining it all. Without having to look the fool he knew he was. Mount Sinai, Egypt ...

tl;dr; Latest stable release of PhantomJS is 1.9.7, and you should probably go and download it. It contains GhostDriver 1.1.0 “Banquo”, and that’s it. 1.9.6, released not more than 2 weeks ago (1 week?), was a coordination went wrong and I take part of the responsibility for it. Just discard that release. What’s the long story? So, for a few days I was helping with testing and refining the new cookiejar module (#11535) for PhantomJS that Joseph Rollinson (jtrollinson) contributed. I’m very interested in this module because it allows to instantiate multiple Cookie Jar objects instead of having all the WebPage object use the same jar. Such feature would allow GhostDriver to finally support Session Isolation (#170), a long overdue feature. ...

It’s long overdue. Last time I have cut a release of GhostDriver (1.0.4) was… July 2013. And blogged about it only in August!!! I gotta take a look at my GitHub commits over the 2013: something tells me that year-in-commits nicely overlaps with my eventful 2013. But let’s try to stay on topic. So, GhostDriver 1.1.0, codename “Banquo”. This time the codename was picked by my wife - fitting, given how important she has become this year for Leonardo and Me. ...

It was 10 years ago. A night just like this one. Winter. Everyone in the house was asleep. Well, Leonardo isn’t really sleeping right now but you get the idea. I was alone in the kitchen. Alone with the TV, an .avi file and an .srt file. I had just started watching movies in foreign language and during the week I had stumbled upon Old Boy. I wasn’t really in the mode of staying up late, but something made me. ...

Puff, Pant! THAT was not easy! But finally, “normality” seems not too far away. Many things have happened in the recent months: we got married; I helped my lovely wife with the pregnancy (well, she did all the hard work); and, on the 7th of November, we have became parents of this beauty: Leonardo Antonio DE MARINO-SIMOLA Now, we have to slowly learn to live our new life together: while we learn how to be parents, Leonardo will be learning how to be a baby. What now looks like a difficult, consuming and intense task (ask me how much we sleep at night!), will at some point become “daily routine”. A sweeter routine with Leo at the center of it all! ...