About Me
I live in San Francisco and work as a Chief Technology Officer for small to medium sized web companies leading technical teams of 3-15 people. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Ruby, Scala, Java, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.
I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.
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Hosting
I use DreamHost for hosting small personal sites. They are a mixed bag as all shared hosting providers are but for the price and storage they can't be beat. If you choose to signup use promo code GABRITO to save $50 on your first year.
For bigger websites which require load balancing, numerous app servers, database replication, CDN, etc I use the Amazon Cloud Services.
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Recent Posts
- Code readability through conciseness
- Mac OS X gem cleanup failing
- iPhone development the easy way
- Production MySQL performance tuning
- Selenium Continuous Integration Runner
- Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects
- Moving to 64 bit Ubuntu
- 8 months off to Mexico and back
- Transcending CSS
- Simple CMS using Google Spreadsheet API
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- Uncategorized
- WAP and WML
- Web
- XML
Category Archives: Systems Administration
Production MySQL performance tuning
For the past 9 years I’ve been working almost exclusively with MySQL (with a little PostgreSQL thrown in) and while I don’t do nearly as much DBA work these days, I still find myself troubleshooting a query or tuning my.cnf. … Continue reading
Open source caching proxy servers
Hello lazy web, I’m looking for some advice on caching proxy servers and thought you might have some good pointers! We currently front our site with 3 caching proxy servers to offload static content from the web servers and we … Continue reading
Ruby on Rails Dreamhost plugin
Update 2/11/07: Just to clarify, this plugin won’t keep your Rails site running on Dreamhost if the sum of all your running processes exceeds 200MB (which is when their process monitor kills your processes). Run ps aux and sum the … Continue reading
Keeping Rails running at Dreamhost Part 2
Update 2/2/07: Per Thomas’ comment I’ve released the code below as the dreamhost rails plugin. Update 1/25/07: People have reported difficulties copy and pasting the dispatch.fcgi source code from this blog post so here is a dispatch.fcgi to download. Make … Continue reading
Keeping Ruby on Rails running at Dreamhost
Update 1/12/07: This solution has reduced my 500 error rate down to less than 0.2% but it’s still not perfect. I continue to plug away at this… Update 1/24/07: I’ve finally solved my Dreamhost 500 error problems with a different … Continue reading
Comparing Amazon EC2 with VPS and dedicated hosting
I’ve been reading all the great things about Amazon EC2 (or Elastic Compute Cloud) and lots of pricing comparisons with VPS and dedicated hosting. I finally got an EC2 account and tinkered a bit and there’s a big difference between … Continue reading
Trafeoffs of aggressive filesystem partitioning
Most systems administrators will tell you it’s important to partition your install into anywhere from 4-7 discrete patitions (or slices if you’re in the BSD camp). While I think it’s good advice in certain cases, the headaches of mis-guessing disk … Continue reading
Hiring a senior MySQL and FreeBSD systems administrator
We’re hiring a senior MySQL and FreeBSD systems administrator to work at GreatSchools (a 40 person company) in San Francisco. If you or someone you know is interested in working on a high traffic website (1M page views per day) … Continue reading
Major sites not conserving bandwidth with gzip content compression
At GreatSchools we do around 1M real page views per day and another 250k or so for crawlers. Before content compression we were running well in excess of 10Mbit/s during peak hours and were getting hit with bursting charges on … Continue reading
Creating subversion repositories for just about anything
I’ve been using Subversion for just about everything I work on including keeping my documents synchronized across multiple computers, backups, source control, etc… I got the idea a while back from Martin Fowler’s Bliki who uses it for a similar … Continue reading