Archive for the ‘ Software Development ’ Category

Ruby Tuesday: Podcast

I find it hard to learn with just one medium like a classroom or a book.  I need multiple sources of information to drill home a subject (I could of course just be dense).  I started learning Ruby on Rails with tutorials, which are great if you want to learn a few things and do [ READ MORE ]

Takeaways from Girls in Tech: Catalyst Conference

Today I attend the Girls in Tech: Catalyst Conference at the Common Wealth Club in San Francisco.  It was a great meeting ground for all girls in tech.  I was introduced to VCs, CEOs, and of course fellow femgineers!  My panel was: “Curious About Coding & Developing: Developing Creativity & Building a Business.”  Here is [ READ MORE ]

Freemarker Browser Issue with Date Formatting

When I have to write an internal tool I use Freemarker as my templating engine of choice, because in one file I can write html, and then access Java objects that are passed in a model. Its faster to use for development than engines like Velocity or XMLC, and has enough functionality to write [ READ MORE ]

The Importance of Readability

When I first started coding I believed it was good enough to get stuff working, and then move on to solving the next problem.  I’d spend a little time designing, but most of my time implementing and testing.  My primary concerns were correctness followed by efficiency.  I didn’t see the point in re-factoring code until [ READ MORE ]

Positional Dependency causes Bugs for Newbies

Fixing bugs is a good way to learn a new code base.  You often go through the procedure of understanding the high level software architecture, and are then given what appear to be fairly straightforward bugs, however, if the nuances of a system are not understood you will end up introducing more bugs than you [ READ MORE ]

Table Tips

Everyone once in awhile I get have to go for coding mode to designing and writing HTML and CSS for an internal tool or translating it into Velocity.  I’ve learned to use Firebug to debug most HTML and CSS issues.  Lately, I’ve been running into table formatting and layout issues, here are few tags and [ READ MORE ]

Hibernate Remote Lazy Loading to the Rescue

I’ve written a couple of posts recently on Lazy Loading, and some of the issues relating to how Hibernate creates and manages proxies.  While lazy loading itself is meant to improve performance, it can still lead to exceptions caused by objects being detached from their session.  As a web service becomes more distributed, and the [ READ MORE ]

Class Cast Exception is a Proxy Problem – Revisited using the Visitor Pattern

In my previous post: ClassCastException is a Proxy Problem I talked about how Hibernate tries to optimize the loading of objects by lazily fetching the parent class object, and returning a proxy for the subclass instead of the actual subclass, thus causing a ClassCastException when the proxy is cast to the actual subclass.  The proxied object doesn’t contain member [ READ MORE ]

Class Cast Exception is a Proxy Problem

I often face the following exception in Hibernate not on my local developer machine, but in production across several servers: java.lang.ClassCastException: mint.hibernate.MathCourse$$EnhancerByCGLIB$$ed898f0d This happens when I try to do something like this: Set<Courses> courses = getCoursesDao().getCourses(userId); for (Course c : courses) { MathCourse mc = (MathCourse) course;      // do something with mc } Assume MathCourse is a subclass of the abstract [ READ MORE ]

15 Ways to Speed Up Your Front-End

Last week I attend the Percona conference in Santa Clara.  The purpose of this conference was to talk about performance related to databases specifically mySQL.  Most of the talks went over my head.  However, there was one talk I attended “Website on Speed” by Philip Tellis from Yahoo! that I thought was outstanding.  In his [ READ MORE ]