Binary Search for Javascript Arrays
If you need to search through a large array, or you search arrays frequently in your Javascript code, or if you do both, chances are a binary search will give you better performance than a linear search (read: for loop). One caveat, however, is that binary search algorithms only work on sorted arrays. Here is a binary search function I sometimes use in my code:
A Better HAProxy Health Check For Dynamic Websites
Nobody wants their website to go down, or worse, for users to notice the site is down. Because of this most larger websites will run on multiple servers to provide some level of high availability. In a multi-server architecture there is typically a load balancer (or cluster of load balancers) to distribute the load among a pool of web servers. When a server goes down it’s taken out of the pool until it is once again ready to handle requests. HAProxy (a software load balancer) has the ability to perform this task by doing periodic health checks on all the servers in a cluster. The default settings, though, could give false positives in some cases, and thus create a bad user experience by allowing ill application servers to continue receiving requests.
Recursive Find and Replace With grep and Perl
I thought it might be a nice idea to start posting useful little commands and bits of code every now and then–ones I’ve found to be particularly useful. So here’s the first one, recursive find and replace. A masterfully crafted regular expression paired with this command can save you hours of tedious work.


