Abstractions are 1 of those things that are fairly easy to understand the basics of, but hard to really do right. They’re a tool used to simplify code by using a simpler-to-understand proxy (like a database record or a class/interface), but that doesn’t really scratch the surface of how to […]
Category: Java
Java-related posts
Just write the setters (and the getters while you’re at it)
I’ve been against the idea of writing getters and setters off as boilerplate for a while, yet sadly that’s the prevailing idea in software development. A large part of that is probably fueled by the fact that we treat objects is nothing more than a local copy of database records. […]
Twitter the (breaking) news app
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 […]
From the “stuff I screwed up” files – the scourge of the automated retries
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 […]
I got 99 problems, and environments are all of them
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 […]
Tuning Java lambda cold start performance
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 […]
Is there a future for Java?
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 […]
parallelStream() at your own risk
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 […]
Debugging a performance bottleneck
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, […]
All hail managed services (or at least good VM automation)
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 […]