Java Lobby Announcements

Coursera run an excellent Scala course which I just had the opportunity of participating in. The course duration is seven weeks. Each week consists of about 1.5 hours of lectures and then an assignment which can take anything between an hour to about 5 hours.  The course syllabus is outlined here.  So personal opinion time... Preview Text:  ...

This is the second part of the article in which I’m sharing a list of simple tips that, in my opinion, can help programmers succeed at their current workplace. You can read the first part here: How to Stand Out at Work: 10 Tips for Programmers (Part 1). We’ve already reviewed 5 items, so let’s continue with the number 6: 6) Try to give realistic estimates Giving too optimistic estimates...

Intro I was aware of thread local but never had the occasion to really use it until recently. So I started digging a little bit on the subject because I needed an easy way of  propagating some user information via the different layers of my web application without changing the signature of each method called. Preview Text:  I was aware of...

Looking at Memcached 10 Years Later This week was the 10 year anniversary since the creation of Memcached.  First created for the blog-building site, LiveJournal, Memcached has remained a staple persistence technology. Preview Text:  Today: Memcached 10 years later, JS struggles, why can't testers and developers get along?; Neil...

Every week, we feature a new developer/blogger from the DZone community here and in our newsletter, catching up to find out what they're working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Mahdi Yusuf, developer at Source Metrics, active member of the Python community, and creator of Neckbeard Republic. Preview Text:  ...

Suppose you have a very large dataset - far too large to hold in memory - with duplicate entries. You want to know how many duplicate entries, but your data isn't sorted, and it's big enough that sorting and counting is impractical. How do you estimate how many unique entries the dataset contains? It's easy to see how this could be useful in many applications, such as query planning in...

With the release of Solr 4.2 we’ve got the possibility to use the HTTP protocol to get information about Solr index structure. Of course, if one wanted to do that prior to Solr 4.2 it could be achieved by fetching the schema.xml file, parsing it and then getting the needed information. However when Solr 4.2 was released we’ve got a dedicated API which can return the information we need...

At the end of April, Leo and I went on a one week trip to the Valley. Over the years, we had built up a number of connections in the Valley and we thought that now was the time to go over there and meet face to face. We end up having 20 meetings over 6 days, which made for quite a schedule. Preview Text:  It’s one thing to know...

As recently as this week, I’ve been involved in conversations with customers about how we can help make their teams deliver more predictably.  How can they meet commitments on all levels of the organization, including project, program, and portfolio? Preview Text:  As recently as this week, I’ve been involved in conversations with...

Ken Robinson recently delivered yet another great talk on the state of American education.  He pointed out that countries that take a more organic approach (e.g. Finland) perform much better overall than those who take a mechanistic, standardized approach (e.g.  The United States with “No Child Left Behind”, emphasis on testing). Remarkably, the organic approach, one using diverse...

A while ago I asked the following question on stackoverflow: “Why would I use a template engine?”. I compared template engines to simple JSP includes. Preview Text:  A while ago I asked the following question on stackoverflow: “Why would I use a template engine?”. I compared template engines to simple JSP includes. ...

Here’s a roundup of tools for the developer which’ll almost certainly have something new to you: 100 Tools to Develop the Next Killer iOS or Android App Preview Text:  Here’s a roundup of tools for the developer which’ll almost certainly have something new to you. Read the comments too. There are more mentioned there. ...

For many Web-based client-server applications, the old HTTP request-response model has its limitations. Information has to be transmitted from the server to the client in between requests, rather than upon request only. A number of "hacks" have been used in the past to circumvent this problem, for example, long polling and Comet. However, the need for a standards-based, bidirectional and...

 My colleague Albert van Veen wrote a blog post about Using ArgumentMatchers with Mockito. The idea is to let a mocked or stubbed service return a different value based on the argument passed into the service. This is inspired me to write the same sample with Spock. Preview Text:  Spock already has built-in mock and stub support, so first...

Here's a video from last August that focuses on Adobe's adoption of Neo4j as their graph solution.   Preview Text:  Here's a video from last August that focuses on Adobe's adoption of Neo4j as their graph solution. Legacy Sponsored:  unsponsored ...

Data scientist Monica Rogati discusses data scaling at LinkedIn and reflects on the evolving role of the data scientist: Preview Text:  Data scientist Monica Rogati discusses data scaling at LinkedIn and reflects on the evolving role of the data scientist. Legacy Sponsored:  ...

It’s insidious. It lurks in damp, dark corners and often goes undetected until it is too late. The symptoms are obvious to those that have encountered it before but a lack of communication often allows it to fester for years right under the nose of upper management. It’s the status quo. Preview Text:  If you take anything away from this...

DDoSaaS Miiiight Be a Little Sketchy Surprise! If you PayPal someone to conduct a DDoS attack, things might get a little shady. Brian Krebs investigates Ragebooter, and finds a one-man operation running out of Memphis, Tennessee, possibly with the authorities’ blessing. Preview Text:  Today: The sketchy world of DDoSaaS, Apple's taxes,...

 A few days ago I was going through a project's Maven dependencies, removing unused junk, checking jar file version numbers adding a little dependency management and generally tidying up (yes, I know that this isn't something we often get time to do, but even Maven dependencies can be a form of technical debt). After recompiling and running the unit tests I ran some end to end tests only to...

In case you missed 60 Minutes on CBS the other night, there’s a new  Preview Text:  As CBS showed, Intel is already selling software to recognize the rough demographic of an individual in order to deliver more a targeted advertisement, and as the report stated, “Big Brother is no longer Big Government. Big Brother is Big...