It’s a tale as old as development – you make an application, and now you need to sell it. That means you need to have a demo, and demos require data in there. The dilemma is, what do you do to get that data? Do you have a demo app […]
Year: 2015
A special thank-you to the people who make good software possible
Since ’tis the season of Thanksgiving, I wanted to offer up a special thank-you to the unsung heroes of any software development project. They’re vital to a good final product, yet most of the time nobody ever realizes the impact they had on getting your software where it is today. So, in the interest […]
The ups and downs of social voting
My friend Warren Myers had an interesting blog post on voting mechanics on various websites, along with “like” mechanic various social networks use (like buttons, +1 buttons, tweet favorites, etc.). I’ve made my feelings on things such as “like” buttons known, so I’m not going to go into those here. Warren raises some good points […]
Don’t bother inventing it here
1 of the last things I worked on in my previous job was converting a cron-generated set of emails about server SLA stats into a web service. Early on into this process, I looked at the ELK stack, discussed it with my team lead, and the two of us ultimately came to the conclusion […]
Titansgrave – proof that RPGs can make good television
Wil Wheaton’s RPG show, Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana, recently finished its first season, and it’s been a lot of fun, not to mention a very well-done story. Normally, you wouldn’t think that an RPG show would make for particularly good television (even if the “television” is airing on YouTube), but it’s a testament to the […]
Mocking a Netty 4.0 server using Mockito
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 […]
The case of the dead dispatcher
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 […]
Some additional Facebook graph API 2.4 release notes
I don’t really have a lot for this post – between the limited uses I have for the Facebook and the somewhat surprisingly non-breaking release, there’s not a lot for me to note with this update. The only issues of note I saw had to do with graph API calls for custom […]
You are not a stakeholder
If you’ve worked long enough, you’ve hit on something that involves multiple people. At that point, the common line is to “get all the stakeholders” together so everyone’s on the same page and actually working together. It’s a good philosophy, that works when you’re getting just the people involved in something together […]
Single-send delivery statistics in a post-single-send aggregation world
About a month ago, Bronto released single-send API aggregation for deliveries. Full disclosure – I work for Bronto, but on the apps team, not the main product (by the way, buy Socialite), and I certainly don’t speak for them – everything here is my personal opinion and observations. This was a good change that improved the performance […]