At Ragnarson we believe that monitoring every aspect of the infrastructure is crucial for a long-term maintenance of infrastructure projects. This is extremely important, it is unlikely for us to take on projects with no budget for the monitoring. But even if you set up alerts for every service, there is one aspect of the monitoring which is overlooked by many beginner engineers.

I have seen and heard many times about infrastructure failing together with monitoring. The app goes down, but the same issue that causes the app to fail also takes down the monitoring service. No one noticed until the customer called and asked why the website is down. It happened to me in the early days of my career. Now setting up additional guards for the monitoring is a mandatory feature of any monitoring system we set up.

This important topic is rarely discussed and difficult to find resources for using Google or any other search methods. In this blog post, I will discuss how you to prevent situations when your infrastructure is down and you do not notice.

Welcome back bitcoin freaks. In the previous episode, we created a multi-sig transaction. Go back to that blog post if you don't know what multi-sig means.

Our code works. The transaction was made. The problem is that it handle only a theoretical use case when both private keys owners use the same machine to sign the transaction. We need to handle a real life situation when they use different machines. They have to be able to sign the transaction and send signatures to each other.

Choosing a project management tool isn’t an easy task. There are tons of SaaS/web-based issue tracking tools out there (like with TODO apps for personal use.) Quora and Stack Exchange threads are full of comments written by marketing teams about these...

The problem

Are you using Heroku or a similar provider and you are not sure how cost-effective it is in the long run?

Are there other limitations of a Platform-as-a-Service of your choice and it would be great to know how expensive and complicated it is to migrate if necessary?

If you are concerned by either of these let me show you if and when it’s worth to start considering a change.

Welcome again. In this episode, we will code a bitcoin multi-sig transaction based on the bitcore library.

A multi-sig transaction means that an output has to be signed by more than one private key. This kind of transactions has a lot of practical use cases. Let’s say we have a company founded by three people. They decided that any outcome has to be confirmed by at least two of them. They create a special bitcoin address where companies bitcoins are stored. The address will require at least two signatures to make any outgoing transaction valid.

As developers we constantly try to improve our knowledge. We are trying to implement features where the code will be easy to maintain in the future. It is really important when we work on some long lasting, complex project. But should it be a priority when we work for a client with limited budget or tight deadline?

Today we will code our first bitcoin transaction. To achieve this goal we will use JavaScript library called bitcore. JavaScript is the most popular, modern programming language and almost every developer knows it, so it makes this article universal and useful for the wider audience.

I've been working with Platform as a Service products for almost 3 years. I truly believe that an introduction of PaaS solutions was a breakthrough for web development.

There are many online services that provide an efficient and relatively cheap entry-level PaaS (e.g. Heroku, EngineYard), but what about self-hosted alternatives? Do they exist? Are they a good call?

It’s our annual tradition that we go to the biggest Ruby conference in Poland - wroc_love.rb. This year it took place from 17th to 19th March. It’s a really good thing to attend programming conferences for couple of reasons and here are my thoughts about it.

We don't have many infrastructure related posts here. We have a few full-time DevOps, it's a part of our normal offer. But, we're busy most of the time. When an opportunity to write a blog post emerged, I knew I've had to write about a thing which changed our workflow. During last two years, there were few ideas which helped us providing better and more reliable services - one of them is infrastructure integration testing.