Feb 072015
 

Pretty much everybody in the developed world (and most of the developing world) interacts with Facebook as an application. Not many people have to actually deal with Facebook from an API level. I’ve spent a few months writing some code that tries to perform a few simple tasks on Facebook, and it’s been rough. Here’s a random collection of things I’ve learned, gotchas, and other points worth noting in the process. As a brief point of reference, most of my interaction with Facebook comes from the server-side code, written in Java, although I’ve played around with Facebook’s JavaScript SDK as well.

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 Posted by at 3:31 pm
Nov 072014
 

1 of the last projects I worked on at my previous job involved aggregating, storing, and querying log data into and from Elasticsearch (yes, I know that Logstash does that – and in reality I should have gone that route). That, along with some lookups on the data outside of the code, gave me a chance to start playing with Elasticsearch. After my brief experience with it, I can tell you there’s a lot of power in Elasticsesarch, but it’s going to take you a surprisingly longer to figure out how to tap it than you would expect. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 12:28 pm

If “it’s not that important” why are we even bothering at all?

 General Commentary, Programming, Projects  Comments Off on If “it’s not that important” why are we even bothering at all?
Feb 192014
 

Have you ever been working on something, and had a thought how something should be done, started to talk it out with somebody, only have the phrase “it’s not that important” get used? If it’s not important enough to think about doing well, why are we thinking about doing it at all then?

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 Posted by at 1:46 am