Horor Vacui

# Horor Vacui

### Being an Imposter and Procrastinator with Passion

### Getting in Shape und Adhearing to GDPR using Ruby

---

# Story time!

* Podcast addict
* Guilty of having written 2 CMS's
* [Layer 8](https://layer8.informatom.com/) in 2013
* lost motivation (or passion?) after 3 regular episodes
* starting podcasting again 3 y ago joining [Biertaucher](http://spielend-programmieren.at/de:podcast:biertaucher:start) 
 (de facto dead after 322 episodes)
* started a new podcast on coding [Aua Uff Code!](https://aua-uff-co.de/) two years ago
* series of episodes on %
---

# Digression

* From Nand to Tetris 
 (Haha! no link, go to show notes!)
* Logic gates -> ALU -> sequential logic -> Assembler
* Confession: No formal degree 
 (not even true: high school teacher of it)
* but no Bacc or Mas
* self taught
* worked 7+ years in SAP
* running my own company with it, so not too bad :-)
* (not really) imposter, more an inferiority complex
* Podcast is a(nother) way of compensating

---

# Learning addict

* Ruby, especially Rails (oo)
* Elixir, Phoenix (fp)
* Running [Panoptikum.social](https://panoptikum.social/) and wrote my first parser
* have probably coded in 40+ languages
* From Nand to Tetris
* currently binge watching [Destroy all Software](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts) 
 sometimes over engineered, tdd, howto build malloc, parser, regular grammar, proper testing, isolation

---

# Back to Ruby

* Picked up [jekyll octopod](https://jekyll-octopod.github.io/)
* Updated it
* Maintaining it ever since
* it generates static sites (see later)

---

# 3 Schweinehunde

* Attended Conference for Sciene Podcasting
* Started another Podcast [3 Schweinehunde](https://3-schweinehun.de/)
* Way more Success!

---

# Time for another confession

* goal: not so much: getting in shape
* actually: loosing weight

---

---

# Time for your confessions

* Who wants to get in better shape?
* Who wants to loose weight?
* Who wants to be a better coder?
* Who wants to make a confession publicly?

---

# Digression

* Weight tracker [bmi.mittenin.at](https://bmi.mittenin.at/)
* You can track yourself!
* Rails app
* Open source
* for me on github - Link on Webpage

---

# Back to Ruby!

* 3 Schweinehunde also hosted with jekyll-octpod
* so no app log
* but webserver log!
* Used [GoAccess](https://goaccess.io/)
* Even published the [stats](https://3-schweinehun.de/stats/report_episodes.html)
* Mini confession: meanwhile they are plain wrong :-)
* Because they are not adhearing to GDPR regulations
* Podcasters are addicted to stats

---

# New Project Anonymizer

* Aggregating records from Apache logs
** on a daily bases
** on episode level

* Rails 5.2 app
* Pushed before: 
 Schreibe Objekte: 100% (264/264), 43.29 KiB | 0 bytes/s, Fertig.
* "Confession": I uploaded my credentials to Github :-)

---

# Auth and encrypted credentials

* Using Basic auth for admin:

```ruby
http_basic_authenticate_with name: "admin",
  password: Rails.application.credentials.basicauth[:pass],
  except: :report
```

* Using encrypted credentials

```ruby
Rails.application.configure do
  ...
  config.require_master_key = true
end
```
---

# Some database stuff

* Using SQLite
* first one database record (hard disk write) per request
* then one database record (hard disk write) per aggregation

* First improvement:
  * Load
  * aggregate in Memory
  * truncate (* later...)
  * save

* Weird fear of losing data

---

# More database stuff

* Actually no truncate in SQLite, but delete_all is fine :-)
* Yes, you could Delete, Drop and recreate

* Second: don't store off requests, aggregate immediately

* Then: configure logrotation
---

# Digression

* and confession
* I was afraid of SQL
* I read the full [Postgres manual](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/manuals/) 
 (imposter + procrastinator)
* Shoutout and thanks to @nuclearsquid, 
 but it took me three years to start reading it...
* if I can get it, you can, too (English imposter)

---

# More database stuff

* File grew

* Who has not used VACUUM in the last year?
* Who does not now? (read the config!)
* The 'database defrag'
* The Vacuum trick

```
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("VACUUM")

```

* cool: rebuilds database file
---

# Another confession

* Using [Chartkick](https://www.chartkick.com/)
* single episodes with 900+ downloads (yeah!)
* Stats can be viewed [here](https://statistik.informatom.com/)

# Bonus tipp

* Have a look at the Passenger (app server) config

```
MAX_POOL_SIZE = 6
```

.. and suddenly some monitoring issues are gone :-)

---

# My personal conclusions

* being self taught is fine
* learning is fun
* running is fun (most of the times)
* loosing weight is tough (but can be done)
* there are backlashes
* be my own metric is better

* don't listen to other people's advice 
 especially not at the end of a talk :-)

# Join 3 Schweinehunde!

* [follow me](https://www.strava.com/athletes/2912755) on Strava
* I am super slow, you can easily beat me! :-)

---

# Thanks!

[@informatom](https://twitter.com/informatom)

Slides: http://informatom.com/presentations/vacuum