Weekly Link Roundup 26th March

A few weeks have gone since my last roundup, I have moved house and started working at a new job so haven’t had much time. That said, here’s a list of articles that I’ve found interesting over the past week. I’ve been getting into the ‘devops’ world recently (or at least using some of the domain tools and learning about scalable infrastructures), so many of the links are related.

Above is a video from HackADay about a new robot called the Sand Flea that has an impressive ability to jump over obstacles. This could be very useful for robotic exploration in areas of difficult terrain.
A scientist has taken over 90,000 hours of video of his baby son via cameras all around the house in order to try and understand the learning of language and how we pick up and reproduce new words. I’m sure that I’ve seen a video of this before a few years ago, but now there is a lot more footage and similarly more interesting results. Read more about it including several videos here.
The new version of Rails has been released, which among other things addresses the config.active_record.whitelist_attributes issue that lead to the GitHub compromise earlier this year.
Ranjib Dey has an overview of the main common parts in web infrastructures.
Nikolay Sturm describes how we can apply object oriented principles such as the single responsibility principle and object extendability to configuration management systems such as Chef.
Nikolay was also featured on the Food Fight podcast talking about Cookbook reusability with Chef.
Etsy have a blog post describing how their infrastructure can scale and pump out new VMs so that newly hired employees can push something to production on their first day. It’s interesting seeing which tools they use and how they use them to facilitate this.
Netflix maintain a technical blog that describes some of the challenges they face and how they go about overcoming them. One in particular talks about fault tolerance in high volume distributed systems and is a useful read for anybody designing a service based architecture.
John Vincent discusses requirements to be able to accurately graph dependencies at macro and micro levels in order to efficiently act upon changes in the dependency hierarchy.
Finally, in a less educational but more entertaining capacity, I have been reading several articles each trying to clarify what DevOps really is and if/why it’s actually useful. Make what you will of the content. What DevOps is not, Ops, DevOps and PaaS (NoOps) at Netflix, and a response to that post.