Working from home changes everything When the world started working from home in mid-March 2020, we noticed substantial and sustained changes to our customer’s usage patterns. Our performance metrics demonstrated these drastic changes. By the end of March, load times were 20-30% slower across the board, even more anomalous than…
Architecture
I’ve always loved learning about different ways messages are encoded. As a little kid I used simple substitution ciphers and created my own alphabets to encode messages to myself. From different books and my computer science classes in college, I learned more about cryptography. I found that, no matter how…
Mismanaging resources is one of the easiest ways to bring down a production system. In a development environment, it’s easy to ignore open streams and temporary files, but at production scale, they can have a hugely negative impact. Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to overlook these issues while developing, even…
Error handling is important for many common operations—from dealing with user input to making network requests. An application shouldn’t crash just because a user enters invalid data or a web service returns a 500. Users expect software to gracefully handle errors, either in the background or with a user-friendly and…
The Play Framework provides a lot of features, which makes it incredibly easy to scale infrastructure. However, scaling a codebase is more difficult. As developers create new components and more complex relationships, the codebase can become unruly for all. To help with this problem, one can use a dependency injection…
Sometimes it seems like functional programmers are a totally different breed. Even by programmer standards, they seem more nerdy than the rest. They use weird terms, such as "monad," "for-comprehension," and "lambda." They use languages that don’t end every line with a semicolon. And, no matter how uneasy Java programmers…