Deploying at GitHub

Deploying is a big part of the lives of most GitHub employees. We don't have a release manager and there are no set weekly deploys. Developers and designers are responsible for shipping new stuff themselves as soon as it's ready. This means that deploying needs to be as smooth and safe a process as possible.

The best system we've found so far to provide this flexibility is to have people deploy branches. Changes never get merged to master until they have been verified to work in production from a branch. This means that master is always stable; a safe point that we can roll back to if there's a problem.

Atop

Atop is an ASCII full-screen performance monitor that is capable of reporting the activity of all processes (even if processes have finished during the interval), daily logging of system and process activity for long-term analysis, highlighting overloaded system resources by using colors, etc. At regular intervals, it shows system-level activity related to the CPU, memory, swap, disks, and network layers, and for every active process it shows the CPU utilization, the memory growth, priority, username, state, and exit code.

What are some time-saving tips that every Linux user should know? - Quora

What are some time-saving tips that every Linux user should know?

Top 10 DTrace scripts for Mac OS X

Mosh

Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.

Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It's more robust and responsive, especially over Wi-Fi, cellular, and long-distance links.

apt-file and finding Ubuntu packages

apt-file can find which packages include a specific file. Ubuntu Packages Search also provides a web UI.

Chef - Opscode

Chef is an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure.

Varnish: Notes from the Architect

"I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975."

Graphite - Enterprise Scalable Realtime Graphing

Graphite is a highly scalable real-time graphing system. As a user, you write an application that collects numeric time-series data that you are interested in graphing, and send it to Graphite's processing backend, carbon, which stores the data in Graphite's specialized database. The data can then be visualized through Graphite's web interfaces.

Used by Etsy.

Etsy also has StatsD (blog post) which is a daemon that increments/times can be sent to, which aggregates them and sends them to Graphite.

Bit.ly command line fu