The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

My job is almost completely reliant upon my ability to perform work in lab of virtual machines. Almost every action plan I write is tested locally. When I need to troubleshoot an issue for a client one of the most common first steps I’ll perform is attempting to recreate the issue in a virtual environment so I can work on it there without the risk of impacting client data.

I believe that having a place to test and grow your skills is an absolute necessity for anyone working in the IT field today regardless of your specialization, even if you’re an IT generalist. But every now and then I hear about individuals who have issues with their virtual machines or with the virtual environment provided by their employer, so I figured this was a good time to share my method of creating a virtual lab. More specifically, one that allows you to do virtual work on a commodity laptop, one that won’t break down if you lose connectivity, one that …

Recently, we’ve seen a few people ask us about building TokuMX from scratch. While it’s best if you just use the binaries you can get from us (they have all the right optimizations, we’ve tested them, and we can interpret coredumps they generate), we recognize there are other reasons you might need to do a custom build.

Since we actually build six distinct products all using the Fractal Tree indexing® library (community and enterprise versions of TokuDB for MySQL, TokuDB for MariaDB, and TokuMX), our build process is pretty complicated, compared to software packages that might, for example, just involve one source repository and link against a few standard libraries. Our TokuMX builds involve four git repositories, three separate build stages, two different build tools, and …

One of the first things we had to do here at OlinData is set up a testing environment. Many customers have many different OS environments and we want to be able to accomodate all of them. With the setup described here, we will be able to easily set up many different OS’s, regardless of the [...]