2015 – Page 2 – Software and Other Shenanigans

Mocking a Netty (3.x) server using Mockito

May 102015

EDIT – This post was written for mocking a Netty 3.x server. For mocking a Netty 4.0 server, see this post.

While working on an app with my current job, I wound up touching some code that didn’t have any unit tests associated with it. Since we’re a small team (but growing), any automation in testing really helps (not to mention just being a good thing to do). The issue was the code was all in a request handler for a Netty server, which meant I needed a way of either running a Netty server during the Maven build process, or I needed to simulate 1 via some type of mocking library. Ultimately, I settled on the latter. Here’s how I did, and the things I learned along the way.

News flash, terrible programmers are hardly “secret”

General Commentary, Programming, Work 3 Responses »

Apr 142015

TechCrunch had 2 articles last month on “Secretly terrible engineers.” Reading the articles makes it sound like there’s a serious problem with how we interview software engineers. Personally, I just don’t see it. Software engineers are like every other profession, the people in it range from terrible to amazing, and the which engineer is which is hardly a secret. Likewise, having just gone through the interview process within the past year, I haven’t really encountered the issues Danny Crichton described. Granted, I wouldn’t interview anywhere near Silicon Valley, so my geography could be affecting what I observed, or I could just be absurdly lucky, but somehow I doubt it. Continue reading »

A handful of undocumented changes in Facebook’s Graph API v2.3

Programming, Work No Responses »

Apr 022015

Facebook released version 2.3 of their Graph API 1 week ago, on March 25. Earlier this week, after encountering errors claiming I was using a deprecated version of the API (a bug in Facebook that I’m pretty sure is long since fixed), I tried switching to the latest API version to see if that solved the problem. It did, but exposed a couple of things missing from their changelog, because what’s Facebook development without incomplete documentation?

Social networks should be like email

General Commentary, Shenanigans No Responses »

Mar 252015

In 1 of my posts about social networks, I harped on the idea of the social network itself being an open platform, with apps running on that platform. What I should have pointed out is that email has been operating as apps on a platform, and they’re a perfect example of what I was talking about. Continue reading »

Facebook development sucks

Java, Programming, Projects 6 Responses »

Feb 072015

Pretty much everybody in the developed world (and most of the developing world) interacts with Facebook as an application. Not many people have to actually deal with Facebook from an API level. I’ve spent a few months writing some code that tries to perform a few simple tasks on Facebook, and it’s been rough. Here’s a random collection of things I’ve learned, gotchas, and other points worth noting in the process. As a brief point of reference, most of my interaction with Facebook comes from the server-side code, written in Java, although I’ve played around with Facebook’s JavaScript SDK as well.

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