https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/ Recent content in Posts on Travis Thieman Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 20 Jul 2014 16:24:15 -0500 https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/fast-zero-downtime-deploy-with-serf-and-lox/ Sun, 20 Jul 2014 16:24:15 -0500 https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/fast-zero-downtime-deploy-with-serf-and-lox/ I recently had the opportunity to revamp our deploy pipeline at GameChanger, my wonderful employer. The result is a system that is robust, doesn’t drop a single request during a deploy, and takes the same amount of time whether we’re running ten instances or a thousand. We achieved this using Serf, which provides a decentralized way to monitor cluster membership and trigger deploy events, and Lox, a simple Redis-backed service that helps us manage distributed locks across our cluster. https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/github-selfies/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 16:24:00 -0500 https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/github-selfies/ Get it now on the Chrome Web Store Now available for Firefox, too! GitHub Selfies lets you add webcam selfies to pull requests and pull request comments on GitHub. That’s it. Really. So now you can be encouraging. Or happy! Or show off your Minecraft ocelot. Or your favorite Pokémon. Update: Now you can put selfies in issues, too! The new version is up on the Chrome store as v1.1. https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/write-you-a-starcraft-ai-in-clojure/ Wed, 15 Jan 2014 16:09:43 -0500 https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/write-you-a-starcraft-ai-in-clojure/ Korhalis a StarCraft: Brood War Terran AI written entirely in Clojure. Current capabilities include unit-level micro routines like marine kiting and worker mineral walking, rote build order execution (9 depot, 11 barracks, etc), and a strategy engine to keep track of what the AI knows about its opponent. It probably won’t beat anyone in a game right now, but it knows some neat tricks.  Korhal bundles a Clojure API to Brood War that can be used to write AIs for any race. https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/ec2-for-23-cents-and-your-own-cloud-for-less/ Sun, 15 Sep 2013 16:05:53 -0500 https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/ec2-for-23-cents-and-your-own-cloud-for-less/ Last week, I reorganized my various desks, computers, keyboards, binary clocks, and comfy blankets in a home improvement frenzy. During this effort, I was forced to confront the two external hard drives collecting dust on my desk, the remnants of an abortive attempt to get a reasonable backup solution in place for my critical data about a year ago. The combination of sweat, technology, and Pat Benatar blasting in the backgroundwas sufficient to kickstart a few weekend infrastructure projects. https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/reviewing-the-250-samsung-chromebook-as-a-developer/ Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:24:26 -0500 https://blog.travisthieman.com/post/reviewing-the-250-samsung-chromebook-as-a-developer/ The Samsung ARM Chromebook (hereafter just “Chromebook”) is an excellent little machine for casual web usage. The mouse and keyboard will be very familiar to Mac users, and the monitor is pretty sharp when viewed head-on. There are some rough edges in the OS itself, such as lack of power management options, but browser performance is much better than I expected from a $250 device. However, putting on my developer hat and running Ubuntu on top of Chrome OS revealed additional problems, some of them major (external monitor support is technically in beta but performs more like an alpha).