Programming – Page 5 – Software and Other Shenanigans

Debugging a performance bottleneck

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.

The care and maintenance of APIs

General Commentary, Programming 1 Response »

Aug 292016

APIs are tricky things to maintain. Because they’re designed to be open by nature, it’s hard to test every possible way someone could use it. That makes incredibly easy to break if you don’t think through any changes you’re making carefully, with an emphasis on what a developer is expecting. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to limit the amount of times you inadvertently break a bunch of applications with a well-meaning API update.

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.

Good logging is an art that I wished I had learned in school

General Commentary, Programming, Work 1 Response »

May 272016

You’re sitting there at work and word reaches you that your application is misbehaving. What’s the first thing you do? Pull up the logs and see what they say. And this is where you may wish that you had an entire class in school dedicated to the art of writing useful log messages. Good logging is an art, and it’s 1 that most of us don’t learn until we’re stuck trying to diagnose something in the wild with subpar messages to guide us.

Campus Navigator updated

Programming, Projects, Shenanigans No Responses »

Jan 012016

So I hadn’t touched Campus Navigator since it was first released in February 2013. Elon University, which I used for my sample implementation, has changed a lot in the nearly 3 years since I published that example, so I spent a little time during the Christmas down period updating that reference implementation, which is now live.

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 »

The case of the dead dispatcher

Java, Programming, Work No Responses »

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.

Some additional Facebook graph API 2.4 release notes

Programming, Work 2 Responses »

Jul 142015

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 audiences. Continue reading »

Single-send delivery statistics in a post-single-send aggregation world

Programming, Work No Responses »

Jun 042015

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 and efficiency of what was 1 of the more expensive API operations. That’s fantastic, but it also impacts the API in ways that Bronto developers are going to need to be aware of. Continue reading »

Mocking a Netty (3.x) server using Mockito

Java, Programming, Work 1 Response »

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.

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