Me

Chad Nierenhausen

Technology Leader, Developer, Amateur Chef, Aspiring Maker

About this Blog - Part 2

History

Before I try to explain the concept of containers, let me start with a story of how we got to where we are now with server technology. Lets assume you have a data-driven website you want to deploy, you recently graduated college so you don’t have much money so you buy one moderately powerful computer run the database and webserver on the same machine. Not only is this a security vulnerability, it doesn’t allow you to scale up if you start to get more traffic than the one computer can handle. As your number of users grow you decide you need to upgrade your infrastructure so you buy another machine, the original runs your database and you move the webserver to the new computer. Now instead of the one machine you had running at an average of 75% resource utilization, you have two machines running at 30% each.

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About this Blog - Part 1

Jekyll

About a year ago I learned about Static Site Generators, systems that allow website developers to use templates, partials, data structures, and control flow statements to build websites, but don’t require a database backend. There is a build step that compiles all of the templates into simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. Octopress was the first generator that I got excited about, but by the time I got around to actually building this site Octopress was smack in the middle of moving to version 3.0, which is a backwards-compatibility breaking change and at the time of this writing there is no concrete release date.

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Hello World

This is the start to my blogging journey. My intent is to use this as a place to post about the things I am working on, both to possibly help others out there on the internets, and to help future me when I run into a problem that I solved before, but have since forgotten what the solution was.

For my initial post, and to test the syntax highlighter, I want to post two little scripts I wrote to rig the results of a Kickball Prom King and Queen voting campaign.

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