Tag Archives: best practices

Retries Can Kill You

Posted on July 30, 2018 by

In a large-scale distributed system, it’s inevitable that some requests will fail. Even if your collaborating systems work perfectly, sooner or later you will experience temporary network issues and other intermittent errors. That’s why a lot of people try to … Continue reading →

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The Curse of Convenience Methods

Posted on February 5, 2017 by

In the old days, many Java APIs were fairly low level and pretty generic. You often had to explicitly select a concrete implementation, provide lots of parameters, and generally needed to know how things worked. This has changed in recent years – modern … Continue reading →

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Let’s Encrypt on Wordpress.com

Posted on April 10, 2016 by

A couple of days ago, WordPress.com announced that they are now supporting TLS for custom domains (which is how this blog is hosted). There are many reasons for not hosting a blog yourself even if you have the necessary skills, like not … Continue reading →

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Let’s Use TLS

Posted on January 17, 2016 by

I have followed the HTTP/2 specification process closely and I like how the new protocol improves web performance and makes old workarounds obsolete. One drawback of deploying HTTP/2 is that most browser vendors only implement it on top of TLS. Since … Continue reading →

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Frontend Engineering

Posted on November 29, 2015 by

Despite all its shortcomings as a programming language, JavaScript isn’t a dirty word anymore. A decade ago, most self-respecting developers would refuse to even touch it, so it was left to web designers and junior developers who spiced up a few HTML pages … Continue reading →

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Normalizing Text in Java

Posted on October 10, 2015 by

Once in a while I see misguided attempts at normalizing text to make it suitable for use in URLs, file names, or other situations where a plain ASCII representation is desired. This can be tricky but with Java’s excellent Unicode … Continue reading →

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Preventing Cascading Failure

Posted on June 28, 2015 by

With the advent of reactive programming and frameworks like Netflix’ Hystrix, classic stability patterns like Nygard’s Circuit Breaker Pattern have entered mainstream software development. The circuit breaker is used inside your clients to cut the connection to a collaborating system … Continue reading →

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