Developer Blog
Java/Scala and Highly Scalable Systems on AWS
Setting up Discourse on AWS
30 June 2014
The Bizo dev team recently decided to experiment with using discourse as a discussion forum. Discourse has published an installation guide for a single-machine setup using DigitalOcean, but we decided to deploy on AWS instead.
ReadWhy Scrum is great, but Kanban makes more sense to us
27 June 2014
In a previous blog post, Extreme Programming For Modern Start-ups, Pat explained from his extensive experience with XP agile methodology why XP isn't always flexible enough for our work organization here at Bizo. My own past experience is with Scrum, the other popular Agile methodology. In this post I want to show where Scrum shines, and why Kanban finally wins for the kind of work we do.
ReadExecutors.newCachedThreadPool() considered harmful
24 June 2014
This is more of a public-service announcement blog-post...
ReadExporting Formatted Code Snippets from Emacs
13 June 2014
I wanted a way to create formatted code snippets (syntax highlighting, etc.) for pasting into GMail or Google Slides. The catch was I didn't want to use a web service (e.g. pastie, hilite.me) or switch from Emacs to another text editor (e.g. Sublime with the SublimeHighlight plugin).
ReadBulk Editing Jenkins Configurations
23 April 2014
During our SCM migration, we had to update the configurations of hundreds of jenkins jobs on three different instances. Rather than do that manually, we wrote this ruby snippet (edit_config.rb):
ReadExtreme Programming For Modern Start-Ups
11 April 2014
Extreme Programming (XP) can be a very effective way to build software, but out of the box, it is poorly suited to many teams. It requires that the team is small, co-located, and working on a single product at any given time. It also assumes that suitable designs can be arrived at by working in micro-increments (eg. TDD cycles) without up-front design. In this post, I'll discuss how XP can be adapted to suit modern start-ups.
ReadThe Mocks Are Alright
20 March 2014
We deploy applications on AWS, and we run jobs that check on them. Like any other code, the jobs need tests.
ReadStatistics With Spark
7 March 2014
Lately I've been writing a lot of Spark Jobs that perform some statistical analysis on datasets. One of the things I didn't realize right away - is that RDD's have built in support for basic statistic functions like mean, variance, sample variance, standard deviation.
ReadRequired Reading Team Geek
7 March 2014
From the beginning (2008), the engineering team at Bizo has focused on building a great culture around a few key attributes like quality, discipline and communication.
Readargs4j-helpers
26 February 2014
I really like using args4j for command-line parsing in both java, and scala, but I found myself writing the same boilerplately code to parse options, deal with help, deal with parsing issues, etc. args4j-helpers is a project that simplifies parsing with args4j.
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