Java – Software and Other Shenanigans

Just write the setters (and the getters while you’re at it)

General Commentary, Java, Programming No Responses »

May 312024

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. The result is that half the time we’re assuming the data is already valid and we don’t have to validate or default anything (when we’re reading it from the database), or that we just have to validate data when it first enters our system via endpoint (when creating or updating a database record). As a result, we don’t have to actually write proper getters and setters, and can lazily just use the templates our IDEs make for us, and outsource our validation to some simple annotations. It’s a tempting sales pitch, but it’s for a specific (limited) use case. Getter and setter methods, on the other hand, are universal.

Twitter the (breaking) news app

Java, Shenanigans No Responses »

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.

From the “stuff I screwed up” files – the scourge of the automated retries

General Commentary, Java, Programming, Stuff I Screwed Up, Work No Responses »

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.

I got 99 problems, and environments are all of them

Java, Programming, Work No Responses »

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.

Tuning Java lambda cold start performance

Java, Programming, Work No Responses »

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.

Is there a future for Java?

General Commentary, Java, Programming No Responses »

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.

parallelStream() at your own risk

Java, Programming, Work No Responses »

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 »

Debugging a performance bottleneck

Java, Programming, Work No Responses »

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.

All hail managed services (or at least good VM automation)

General Commentary, Java, Programming, Work No Responses »

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.

Mocking a Netty 4.0 server using Mockito

Java, Programming, Work 3 Responses »

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 »

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