Blue Matador

A quick post to introduce the software monitoring company I've been building over the last year. It's called Blue Matador, Inc. When your website or application goes down, Blue Matador helps you understand what broke, why it broke, and how to fix it quickly.

Our first product is Lumberjack: a centralized log management system that gives you better insights, faster. It takes 10 minutes to set up, and crunches your log data within 2 seconds of realtime.

I've spent years without vacations, days without rest, and nights without sleep - all because I was on call and fixing problems. Sound like you? From one sysadmin to another, it's not worth it. Get better tooling, solve your problems faster, and fix root causes.

If you mention this post, I'll give you a discount, just ask for me (Matthew the CEO).

Play! 2.3 Template Improvements

My thanks go out to Grant Klopper from The Guardian. Last week, he validated a change I made to the Play! Framework back in December. After upgrading from Play! 2.2 to 2.3, Grant noticed dramatic changes in response times and memory - both for the better. The changes were so awesome that Grant was able to shut down 2/3 of the servers running that app. A conversation on Twitter followed with James Roper, a lead developer at Typesafe, wherein the root cause for the improvements was discovered - my template fixes. A subsequent blog post from Typesafe was released about the story, thanking the contributors and soliciting further enhancements to their code base.

Response time of The Guardian website during upgrade to Play 2.3.
Copied from Grant's Tweet about response times mentioned above.

Without bragging about my awesomeness, I wanted to explain how I found and fixed the issue and then share some benchmarks of my own. Perhaps in this way, I can also solicit enhancements to the Play! framework, which has been a tremendous help in building state-of-the-art applications on the web.