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…
scala
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…
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…
Last summer, our team added support for importing Adobe InDesign files into Lucidpress, a cloud-based publishing app. Specifically, the app now supports IDML files, which consist of XML files packaged up in a .zip file. The process of conversion involves: Parsing the XML from the IDML file into a model…
Abstract Lucidchart is a collaborative diagramming SaaS application. This session’s speakers have been transitioning from a monolithic CakePHP application to a services-oriented RESTful system based solely on Scala. They discuss their decision to ditch PHP and how they ended up with a working set of services. First, they explain their…