markofu’s blog

Receiving mails via LinkedIn is an interesting experience. For example, how many folk actually personalise "contact requests" - from what I see, less than 1%. I typically try to because I think it shows some thought has gone into the request and it's friendly, but then "manners" on the Internet is a very different thing to the real world, right ;-) Anyway, to the point of the blog post. In early November (2012), whilst I was preparing my Security Onion presentation for IrissCon  (why did I bother when my MBP died on-stage), I received a very interesting and personal email via LinkedIn. The email came from a "Senior International Belief Instigator" (let's call him the SIBI - to save me typing) at Riot Games and the email was literally awesome, it hit many of the key points that you'd hope for in a recruiter email but it also had a wonderful tone. In my ignorance, I knew of League of Legends but not Riot (yes, I am embarrassed by that). I r...

Introduction Having answered numerous questions on the new and old authori(s|z)ation within MongoDB, I thought I'd write a short blog post explaining how things work as there seems to be some confusion. What's New Prior to version 2.4 , there was a very basic sense of "Role Based Access Controls" (RBAC) within MongoDB as there were only two roles - read readWrite which is quite limited. For example, if the user has "readWrite", that user is essentially "root" and the user can add/remove users as well as inserting data into the database, i.e. there is no role segregation. Version 2.4 added in the following 3 core roles - userAdmin dbAdmin clusterAdmin with a notable extension such that there are now 4 roles that apply across all databases - readAnyDatabase readWriteAnyDatabase userAdminAnyDatabase dbAdminAnyDatabase This increased RBAC is a significant improvement from a security perspective in MongoDB. It is imp...

I'm just back from a superb (or in "American" : super exciting) MongoDB London conference. I've been told there were over 500 attendees and as you can see below, the venue was sweet :) I have uploaded my slides to SpeakerDeck, I'm no longer using Slideshare as a repository for my presentations (I just don't think it's as good visually or in terms of a usage experience). Using the MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) Securing your MongoDB Implementation Thankfully the two presentations went well and I received great feedback (hey @rozza, no yellow discs buddy - yellow discs indicated a sub-par presentation, blue = good and green = excellent :) ). More importantly, there was no "Black Screen of Death" on the MBP unlike at IrissCon ! Please have a look at the slides and if there are any questions or mistakes, please let me know. Thanks to the whole 10gen team (especially the community folk) for organising such an awesome event and more i...

So back in July, I wrote a blog post talking about my experiences being a so-called "phone jockey", i.e. a support engineer, for 10gen. For those cynics out there, it wasn't written by HR, modified by marketing or requested by management or anyone in our recruiting team - I wrote it off my own back because I've a tendency to do things off my own back I wanted to explain what being a "support engineer" actually meant and more specifically, what it entailed in a small, innovative, fun company like 10gen I now have somewhere to point people too when they ask my what life as a "support engineer" in 10gen is like to get kudos within 10gen and please management When I wrote the blog post, I intended it to be a once-off (why would anyone agree to writing a multi-part blog series) but I was encouraged to at least write a second post by @francium and she's very cool so I let it slide and agreed!!! One of the ideas that I had was talking ...

There's a mis-conception around the role of a "Support Engineer".  As a clue, it's not what Urban Dictionary   says   - A person whose job is to answer calls from customers of a small- to large-sized company...... They are teathered to a their desk all day via phone headset........ phone jockeys usually hate their jobs.......they are are paid well enough..........until they completely burn out, and hate everyone.   and doesn't always involve this - Image Source: http://half-bakedbaker.blogspot.ie/2009/11/cannoli-and-broken-computer.html As you can see  here , there's lots of open roles in  10gen  and more specifically with 10gen, in  Dublin . I thought I'd write this quick blog to explain what Support Engineers actually do and why I joined 10gen as a "Support Engineer". I could be wrong but didn't Google come up with term " Site Reliability Engineer " to do away with the stigma associated with being a...