Improving bad on-call with the Snowball Effect

I’ve worked on several different teams over the past 8 years I’ve worked at Amazon. Each one of them had on-call in which the engineers were on-call to keep the system running 24/7 for a week. If something broke at 2am, they’d get paged to fix it. Now, Amazon’s a big company. On-call varied quite a bit. Some teams had more ops load, others had barely any. I had my fair share of weeks with lots of tickets, but usually I sought out teams where it was more manageable.

Local Energy Monitoring using the Emporia Vue 2

This article is part of the Home Energy Monitoring series.

I’ve previously explored the world of home energy monitoring systems and in the past arrived at using the Brultech GreenEye Monitor for a project in a friend’s house. It had the advantage of being local out-of-the-box and had a wide range of compact CTs that made fitting the electronics in the breaker box a lot easier, but it had one flaw that made it not suitable for my condo. It had to be mounted outside the breaker box with wires running into the box.

Zeppelin v0.10 not showing matplotlib graphs

I upgraded to Apache Zeppelin v0.10.x from v0.9.x and randomly my Python Matplotlib scripts stopped rendering images. Anything that called the plot method would just return the string response of the function. Like below: 1 2 3 4 5 %python import matplotlib.pyplot as plt plt.plot([1, 2, 3]) [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x7ff547624210>] If this happens to you, just add the following directive after %python: 1 2 3 4 5 %python %matplotlib inline import matplotlib.

Rewriting Home Assistant Long-term statistics from InfluxDB

In an earlier post, I made an error that incorrectly aggregated the energy data which resulted in hugely inflated aggregated energy usage. All the un-aggregated data was accurate, but the sums were wrong. Luckily I had all the raw data stored in InfluxDB and could rebuild it. In this post, I walk through how to re-write the Home Assistant Long-term statistics database to fix this mistake. A grossly high electric bill