barsxl

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
42
Submissions
21
Member since
Sep 27
I work on infrastructure/systems at Automattic.

https://barry.blog

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Senior Systems Engineer (Systems Wrangler) | $110-$210k+

We're looking for the world's best systems engineers to help build and maintain the infrastructure that supports over a billion people each month across our entire line of products and services such as WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Texts.com, Day One, Pocket Casts and many more.

Here are the goals of the team that you would join:

* Remove as much friction as possible between Automattic developers and their goal of shipping software. When there are questions, we can provide answers in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds.

* Make Automattic services as fast as possible through optimization of server-side and client-side interactions.

* Maximize the availability and uptime of all services through proactive planning, sound architectural decisions, and rapid response to failures.

* Ensure our services are safe and secure for both our users and employees through a combination of proactive monitoring and enforcement, real-time response, and ensuring data integrity/backups to allow recovery from disasters.

* Share our code, experience, and knowledge, both internally and externally whenever possible. Internally, this is usually accomplished via Slack, IRC, internal blogs, and code reviews. Externally, we try to blog publicly, speak at conferences, contribute to open source software, and release our own software under an open source license.

* Control costs through careful selection of technology partners and prudent negotiations of pricing and contracts. We work with 3rd party services where it makes sense, but always look at the big picture and value control and performance over cost.

https://join.a8c.com/hn

Comment · 2 years ago
Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Senior Systems Engineer (Systems Wrangler)

We're looking for the world's best systems engineers to help build and maintain the infrastructure that supports over a billion people each month across our entire line of products and services such as WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, and many more.

Here are the goals of the team that you would join:

* Remove as much friction as possible between Automattic developers and their goal of shipping software. When there are questions, we can provide answers in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds.

* Make Automattic services as fast as possible through optimization of server-side and client-side interactions.

* Maximize the availability and uptime of all services through proactive planning, sound architectural decisions, and rapid response to failures.

* Ensure our services are safe and secure for both our users and employees through a combination of proactive monitoring and enforcement, real-time response, and ensuring data integrity/backups to allow recovery from disasters.

* Share our code, experience, and knowledge, both internally and externally whenever possible. Internally, this is usually accomplished via Slack, IRC, internal blogs, and code reviews. Externally, we try to blog publicly, speak at conferences, contribute to open source software, and release our own software under an open source license.

* Control costs through careful selection of technology partners and prudent negotiations of pricing and contracts. We work with 3rd party services where it makes sense, but always look at the big picture and value control and performance over cost.

We're currently #4 on DNSPerf.com, can you help us get to #1?

https://join.a8c.com/hn

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Thanks for the heads up. We have removed this file from the platform for now while we review.
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks for pointing that out. I fixed the post.
Comment · 10 years ago
> Can you elaborate just a smidge? Is WordPress.com, for example, not encrypting content when it's requested by iTunes? (Thanks!)

Yes, we have some targeted exceptions for incompatible clients.

Comment · 10 years ago
Many of the larger webhosts have free (but not mandatory) SSL support in production, beta, or on their near-term roadmap.
Comment · 10 years ago
This happens with the https:// vary rarely. The http:// case happens more often. This is one of the complications in adding HSTS headers with includeSubDomains. Right now, the http:// version works as expected, but if we added HSTS with includeSubDomains for "wordpress.com" those URLs would stop working and generate a SSL error.

Somewhat related - if you have a mapped/custom domain on WordPress.com, even though we are strongly no-www[0] the "www" will work over HTTPS, assuming that DNS for the sub domain points to our servers[1]

0. http://no-www.org/ 1. https://www.1912.me/

Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
Yes, we're working on it.
Comment · 10 years ago
> I believe it's breaking podcast feeds being served with WordPress.com, because iTunes doesn't support Let's Encrypt certificates.

Do you have an example? We have already implemented workarounds for iTunes. If they aren't working I would love to know the specifics so we can fix it.

Comment · 13 years ago
WordPress.com offers two-step authentication for all of our users. You can use any application which supports Time-Based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) such as Google Authenticator, Authy, etc. and you can also receive a one time password via SMS.
Comment · 13 years ago
WordPress.com has pretty sophisticated brute force detection mechanisms and protections in place. I am not sure why you would say otherwise.
Comment · 14 years ago
The majority of our transient bugs on WordPress.com are probably related to APC opcode issues. We try to catch them and handle it gracefully, but it isn't always so easy.
Comment · 14 years ago
Of the 2000 servers, about 90% of them are running something related to WordPress.com. There are 36 "load balancer" servers in total. I added up the req/sec across those 36 machines and came up with the 70k/sec number in the article. The requests aren't evenly distributed across that subset of machines though, so you can't just divide evenly to figure out a req/sec/CPU rate. I left another comment in this thread that mentions 5k req/sec on a "normal" load balancer and that the limiting factor isn't Nginx CPU usage.

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