The banks have nothing to do with the cost of commercial rent around old street roundabout and the shoreditch triangle. It's expensive because all the silly startups now think they need to be here to sound credible / look cool / etc etc so landlords can charge these prices and people will pay. Infrastructure wise, the area is a mess. Fibre coverage is spotty at best. ADSL seems to be pretty crap. Most buildings are poorly converted from storage/etc into office space.
On the plus side we have nice places to eat, drink and get coffee so it's not all bad I suppose. Also the commute is pretty good for east london folk.
Also side rant. To all non-londerners, Tech City / Silicon Roundabout is an abstract concept that doesn't actually exist in any concrete form. Unless someone told you, you wouldn't even notice you were passing through it. Infact the only remotely "tech looking" building is satellite company Immarsat's HQ office, and IIRC they were around long before "tech city" had been dreamed up.
I think they meant "next door" in the sense that, someone consider where to work would probably go to the big banks as opposed to the lower paid startup "next door".
Writing code/recipes/etc for chef/ansible/puppet is no different to writing code for an application. Just because you think you have dictated (in code) that things should be a certain way does not mean that what will be executed or run.
nagios is awful :-), active checks are ultimately a dead end.
Heartbeat style stuff is where it's at.
You should definately check out sensu and riemann, (or hevean forbid if you really like node.js everything Godot)
because PHP is "slow" and c is "fast", just about anything thats written in PHP such as FastCGI parser would be daftly slow compared to a counterpart written in c or c++. Most people will not be prepared to sacrifice perfomance just for the sake having everything in PHP
I know microbenchmarks are generally daft and horribly misapplied, but it might be worth showing/measuring the difference between using built-in procedural methods and your OO ones on some some example use cases to stop people speculating and just to make sure you aren't majorly shooting yourself in the foot perfomance wise for the benefit of a nice API.
They can (and often are), but some of the drones are capable of completely computer controlled take off and landing. I remember seeing somewhere that the human drone pilots caused more crashes when landing than the computer controlled ones.
Also side rant. To all non-londerners, Tech City / Silicon Roundabout is an abstract concept that doesn't actually exist in any concrete form. Unless someone told you, you wouldn't even notice you were passing through it. Infact the only remotely "tech looking" building is satellite company Immarsat's HQ office, and IIRC they were around long before "tech city" had been dreamed up.