pedrokost

We recently completed the migration of a self-hosted 3 TB PostgreSQL database from version 12 to 16, transitioning from Ubuntu 18 to Ubuntu 22. Concurrently, we had to upgrade various extensions, most notably Timescale, for which a compatible version did not exist across all scenarios. We performed the upgrade by updating a replica in the following sequence:

- Start: PG12, Ubuntu 18, TS2.9

- Step 1: Set up a read-only replica with PG12 on Ubuntu 22, maintaining TS2.9.

- Step 1.5: Enter maintenance mode and halt all services.

- Step 2: Detach the the read-only replica, upgrading from PG12 to PG15 on Ubuntu 22 with TS2.9.

- Step 3: Upgrade from PG15 with TS2.9 to TS2.13 on Ubuntu 22.

- Step 4: Upgrade from PG15 to PG16 on Ubuntu 22 with TS2.13.

- Step 4.5 : Reconnect services to the new database server, resume all services, and exit maintenance mode.

All the database upgrade steps were well-tested and automated using Ansible. Nonetheless, we did encounter an issue that had not arisen during testing. This extended our downtime to approximately half an hour, which, for our use case, was perfectly acceptable.

Employing logical replication could have mitigated the last-minute surprise. So we will consider this approach for our next upgrade cycle.

Sentinel Marine solutions | Backend Engineer (Python) | HYBRID (Ljubljana, Slovenia) | Full-Time

We are looking for a Backend developer with a 5+ years of relevant experience. Our stack is Python, Django, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, RabbitMQ. We use Docker, Ansible, and more.

Sentinel is the maker of the "App for boats". We help make the ownership experience of the boat easier with telematics, by keeping you connected to your boat, giving you at-a-glace overview of vital boat equipment, and helping you with boat maintenance with reminders. We also connect the boat owner with the dealer and the broader ecosystem of partners relevant for boat ownership. Our products are a keystone piece of equipment on boats from the largest boat builders worldwide. We are still a small team (20 people), and are making waves in the boating industry. Your contributions will have a huge and direct on the boating experience of current and new boats.

This is a position requiring at least partial onsite presence, so it's local to Ljubljana and nearby areas. This is to facilitate working with hardware/firmware engineers when necessary, and mentoring less experienced developers.

To apply, email: jobs {at} sentinelmarine.net

The author has gained a significant amount of Postgres-related knowledge when performing this migration.

Taking this into consideration, is it still worth using the managed Aurora, instead of the EC2 self-managed instance?

This sounds great. Instead of trusting each company to implement their own billing system with some payment processor, just have the payment processors and banks provide "apps" that support these protocols, and users can chose which one to use to complete their payment.

One interesting follow up question in who covers the processing fee (e.g. the ~3% or so that Braintree or Paypal currently take)? Today, processing fees are mostly hidden to the user. If the user can chose their own payment processor, will they be required to cover the processing fee instead of the merchant?

Chrome has this built-in as a flag: chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark

It will render all web pages with dark mode

I have been observing something similar recently, but related to other technologies. People claiming they are good at Excel, but can't do a vlookup or a pivot table. People using 5% of the power of an IDE. People not realizing that if they are able to use a web-based tool at work, they could (probably) also access it remotely.

And these are just the things I have noticed in the past week.

We utilize just a tiny percentage of options that are available to us, barely enough to get the basics of out tasks done. But we are completely oblivious that there are probably better/hidden/power tools available in the software we are already using that could help us achieve our tasks much more efficiently.

Interestingly, most people probably don't care about it, or are so oblivious of their lack of knowledge that they don't even search for better ways to do things.

It's hard to blame thought. Improving this state requires a mentality of continuous active learning, where you don't just wait for someone to show you how to do your task better, but to constantly expand your knowledge into areas you don't even think you need to improve. However, most of us usually have "better things to do" than reading software manuals.