Dec 122022
 

Elon Musk has tweeted extensively about Twitter and journalism, and what that can mean for the future. I know a lot of people like to complain about his approach to running Twitter, but I think there’s something to his ideas. I once thought that WikiTribune would be the bridge that leads to a new type journalism due to its wiki-style approach. I was clearly wrong, as WikiTribune lasted about 2 years and is now a social media site. Twitter, however, may be able to succeed where WikiTribune failed, assuming it can figure out a business model that keeps the servers on.

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 Posted by at 11:45 AM
Jun 302021
 

We all screw up, it’s part of life. What’s important that we learn from it all. I’ve found it’s generally better to document the learning, both to help internalize it, and to share it with who I can. I recently worked an issue stemming from automated API call retries that didn’t go nearly as well as it probably should have, and I wanted to take a little time to post-mortem on how everything went, and how it could have gone better. A lot of this is fairly specific to what I was doing with that particular problem, but there’s hopefully some general lessons that can be drawn from the whole ordeal.

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 Posted by at 11:45 AM
May 312021
 

We’re all used to dealing with different environments in our code. On the surface, this just means that we need to make sure our code runs fine in all of our environments. But what about the other services that your code is consuming? If your reaction is that it’s the responsibility of the team writing and running that code to make sure that it’s up and running, you’re living in a fantasy. At some point, you have to write (and maintain) your side of the connection to those services, and if something goes wrong, you have to be able to show the issue isn’t on your end. Oh, this is assuming an exact 1-1 match between your environment and their environment (for example, your dev to their dev, your QA to their QA). Even if the external environment doesn’t use the same naming conventions as you, having each of your environments connect to 1 (and only 1) environment of an external service simplifies things exponentially. If people are asking that you update your code to point to other environments of your dependencies, your life gets complicated fast.

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 Posted by at 8:00 AM
Mar 312021
 

During some recent performance testing at work, we noticed an endpoint showing slower than usual response times. Digging into the calls, we found that on slow responses, virtually all the time was spent on waiting for a specific lambda function to return data. Digging into that function we found several calls that appeared to be timing out, and many others that were taking 9-10 seconds. This lead to a day or 2 spent reading up on the workings of AWS lambdas and how they work with Java. What was probably most striking is that while the solution to our problem was eventually findable with some Googling – and the “fix” involved practices that are mentioned in the official AWS documentation – they’re almost mentioned in passing, and don’t call out the performance impacts they have on your billed runtime.

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 Posted by at 11:45 AM
Apr 302019
 

I’ve been developing in Java since late 2009. It’s a good language, but I’m starting to wonder what kind of future it has. I’ve been using Java 8 since shortly after it came out, even though Java is currently on version 11. Java’s obviously still being developed, so why not move forward? A big part isn’t the infamous module system that launched in Java 9, and broke a lot of stuff. Part of it is the fact that Java is owned and controlled a by a company that seems more interested in rent-seeking off oa Java than doing anything innovative with it.

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 Posted by at 11:45 AM
Jun 262017
 

Java 8 introduced a lot of cool features, 1 of the most useful of which was the stream() method. This nifty little method lets you treat an Iterable as a stream, enabling cool things like lambdas operating over a list. Related to stream() is parallelStream(). This lets you group your stream into smaller streams that are run in, you guessed it, parallel. Specifically, your data is processed in a thread pool the size of the number of cores on your machine, minus the one running your app. That’s a handy piece of information you’re going to want to keep in mind before you start throwing this nifty little call around in your code.  Continue reading »

 Posted by at 2:44 PM
Sep 302016
 

Recently, we had a Kinesis consumer back up due to a deployment problem. Sadly, this problem went on for 2 days without us noticing, so we were pretty backed up. Now in theory, we should have been able to catch back up to real-time data sometime later that calendar day. In reality, we fell 2 days behind and it took us 2 days to catch up. That’s not acceptable, and I wanted to document the list of things we tried and how well they worked and to document our process for looking for the bottleneck. Obviously, there’s tons of room for improvement in the code, but there’s also a lot of room for improvement in how we were doing things before, and probably a lot of room for in how we went about trying to fix the issue.

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 Posted by at 10:00 PM
Aug 022016
 

I transferred teams at work recently, and spent about a week trying to get their code running on my laptop so I can do useful development work. This is in addition to trying to wrap my head around the existing codebase and figuring out how to test my changes. It’s not that the code is bad, it’s just getting all the ****ing components hooked up, communicating with each other, and playing nicely together an exercise in impossibility. Coming from a group that ran everything in AWS, going back to managing all the third-party services in a development environment makes me want to flip my desk over and start screaming about what the **** is wrong with everyone.

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 Posted by at 12:41 AM
Aug 082015
 

My last post about mocking a Netty server using Mockito worked for Netty 3.x, but the changes made in Netty 4.0 broke a lot of that work. After spending some quality time reading up on the changes from 3 to 4 and debugging my testing code, I got my mocked Netty server working with Netty 4.0, and now I’m posting it here in the hopes it helps anyone else who’s looking to mock a current Netty server for their unit tests.  Continue reading »

 Posted by at 12:04 PM
Jul 232015
 

A while back at work, we noticed a periodic issue where remote jobs just weren’t being run. That was being caused by the fact that the jobs weren’t actually being sent to the remote AWS instances that were meant to be running said jobs. Just why the jobs weren’t being sent out was a mystery, but a simple bouncing of either the remote servers or the main application itself seemed to get things moving again. In the meantime, we were off on a hunt for just why these jobs were no longer getting dispatched.

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 Posted by at 7:30 AM