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Innovation starts with good APIs | Tadhg Pearson
https://tadhgpearson.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/innovation-starts-with-good-apis
Down in the trenches of Software Engineering. Gilpin on the Globe. Imperial’s Software Performance Engineering Laboratory. Innovation starts with good APIs. Written on September 21st, but only got around to publishing now). I’ve spent much of the last two weeks, along with several of my colleagues, developing an entry for tHACK SFO 2012. Here were some of the issues I encountered with those APIs – take it as a list of red flags to be noted when releasing a new API. Forget it. Simple tools are availab...
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The Importance of Using Real Data when Developing a Proof-of-Concept | Tadhg Pearson
https://tadhgpearson.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/the-importance-of-using-real-data-when-developing-a-proof-of-concept
Down in the trenches of Software Engineering. Gilpin on the Globe. Imperial’s Software Performance Engineering Laboratory. The Importance of Using Real Data when Developing a Proof-of-Concept. When developing data-driven software, there’s a constant tension between anonymity and usefulness. Well, to anyone you want to sell it to, I imagine. But this is a dangerous demand. You can never know if your data is not believable until it’s too late – in the same way as if you can never know i...Your team probabl...
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Be careful – Java SimpleDateFormat is not always symmetric | Tadhg Pearson
https://tadhgpearson.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/be-careful-java-simpledateformat-is-not-always-symmetric
Down in the trenches of Software Engineering. Gilpin on the Globe. Imperial’s Software Performance Engineering Laboratory. Be careful – Java SimpleDateFormat is not always symmetric. For Java date conversion we make heavy use of Java’s SimpleDateFormat. In this case, I wanted to print the time of departure of Amtrak trains, using the standard travel agent date format,. I will get a ParseException. Inspecting the source code, it’s easy to see why. If there’s a delimiter in the pattern, it will peek ...
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Gah! Joda DateTimeBuilder is not always symmetric either | Tadhg Pearson
https://tadhgpearson.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/gah-joda-datetimebuilder-is-not-always-symmetric-either
Down in the trenches of Software Engineering. Gilpin on the Globe. Imperial’s Software Performance Engineering Laboratory. Joda DateTimeBuilder is not always symmetric either. In a previous post I complained that Java Date Format. Well, turns out Java 7’s Joda Time is also not necessarily symmetric… even when the formatter is not lossy! Try it and see (for this to work, your current system time must not be UTC! DateTime now = new DateTime(DateTimeZone.UTC).withMillis(0);. AssertEquals(now, then);. Migrat...
tadhgpearson.wordpress.com
tadhgpearson | Tadhg Pearson
https://tadhgpearson.wordpress.com/author/tadhgpearson
Down in the trenches of Software Engineering. Gilpin on the Globe. Imperial’s Software Performance Engineering Laboratory. Author Archives for tadhgpearson. Recently, I was asked for my opinion on JSON-API as a potential standard for RESTful APIs. While I like the idea of some standardization for RESTful JSON responses, I feel that JSON API woefully misses the mark, and here’s why. Let’s take the simple example from JSON API’s site. Articles" : [{ id : 1, "title": "JSON API paints my bikeshed! For(var da...
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Who wants to write a 200 page report that no-one will ever read? | Tadhg Pearson
https://tadhgpearson.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/who-wants-to-write-a-200-page-report-that-no-one-will-ever-read
Down in the trenches of Software Engineering. Gilpin on the Globe. Imperial’s Software Performance Engineering Laboratory. Who wants to write a 200 page report that no-one will ever read? I was at the Data Without Borders DC Data Dive. A couple of weeks back, definitely a trip out of my usual worlds of Java and travel IT and visit into something a bit different. A couple of quotes stuck in my head from that weekend – the first was from one of the participating charities, DC Action for Kids. While I belie...
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Exception Antipatterns | Tadhg Pearson
https://tadhgpearson.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/exception-antipatterns
Down in the trenches of Software Engineering. Gilpin on the Globe. Imperial’s Software Performance Engineering Laboratory. Java has pretty good exception handling, but it’s something that a surprising number of programmers get wrong. The point of an exception is to provide detailed information to software maintainers about the reason for a program’s failure. The three key points here are:. Bearing that in mind, here’s some anti-patterns I’ve recently seen around exceptions. Lets look at w...Try{ stuff th...
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Migrating from Play Framework v2.2 to Activator v2.3 | Tadhg Pearson
https://tadhgpearson.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/migrating-from-play-framework-v2-2-to-activator-v2-3
Down in the trenches of Software Engineering. Gilpin on the Globe. Imperial’s Software Performance Engineering Laboratory. Migrating from Play Framework v2.2 to Activator v2.3. I really like the Play Framework. It’s a good idea to read the documentation at https:/ www.playframework.com/documentation/2.4.x/Migration23. Here’s a summary of the changes you’ll need to move a Java project. Before you begin…. If your project uses LESS, you now have to explicitly indicate that you want LESS files to be compiled...
