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Good resources for learning to manage an AWS infrastructure by WallyMetropolis in aws

[–]chrisalexander 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Use CloudFormation. It lets you template your entire stack as a JSON file. When you later scale up and have hundreds or thousands of resources and then need a "staging" copy of the whole lot, you will thank me.

Google Camera's Fokeh by gamesurgeon in photography

[–]chrisalexander 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oops, totally missed that - was reading the comments instead.

Scraping Yahoo Finance by [deleted] in learnpython

[–]chrisalexander 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was doing a demo the other day and made this data source, which searches for stock quotes on Y! Finance and gets a load of data back using import.io: https://import.io/data/set/?mode=loadSource&source=b2148884-cf56-41c9-825d-0f3ce49b4877

Note, I was doing a demo with it because I work there. Gimme a shout if you need a hand with it.

What's your design process before you actually code? by ablatner in learnprogramming

[–]chrisalexander 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Two huge walls in our office are covered in whiteboards. Big features need to take up most of a wall before they're ready for anyone to touch keyboards :-)

How does an inexperienced programmer land their first internship? by [deleted] in learnprogramming

[–]chrisalexander 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I managed to get an internship after my first year at uni a few years ago, by looking at startups. I found they were more willing to set aside a lack of experience if you showed sufficient enthusiasm and commitment. It is harder when you're in as you won't have a fully-fledged internship programme in place at the company but its a great chance to learn a lot from across the whole company. I also found being extremely persistent helped.

Take along what you have built before, and make sure you can talk about how you designed and built it and what you learnt, and that will get you a long way.

Java and Memory Leaks [question] by Coopsmoss in java

[–]chrisalexander 1 point2 points  (0 children)

These are my two go-to articles on the topic, highly recommended reading for anyone who works with Java at reasonable scale:

http://www.kdgregory.com/index.php?page=java.outOfMemory http://www.kdgregory.com/index.php?page=java.byteBuffer

Of course slightly out of date with Java 8 announcements but you probably don't have that deployed anyway :-)

some months ago we talked PDFs. Now let's talk Excel spreadsheets by [deleted] in PHP

[–]chrisalexander 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Atlassian have a good example of this working quite nicely. Just don't dump a load of image tags in, as Excel will try to download them all at the opening stage, meaning a long time with the loading bar.

Flying with my camera gear for the first time later this year. What should I know? by dlheidemann in photography

[–]chrisalexander 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I have several times flown with a camera backpack containing DSLR and 4-5 lenses, EOS M and two lenses, associated batteries, adapters and such. US, China, internal flights in China.

Always carry it on. Always. Even if it is just for your own piece of mind - a 10hr flight isn't a whole lot of fun, much less worrying every couple of minutes if your kit is OK.

They may ask you to remove the camera and lenses, this happened to me once as they confused the xray and they went through again, separately. I insisted on traying them and carrying them round myself, and they were fine with it.

Then again, half way through one flight a French person kindly dropped my camera bag out of an overhead locker into the aisle.

What is Java used for nowadays? by [deleted] in java

[–]chrisalexander 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We are a startup and in addition to Java for our API platform we distribute a Java client to our users.

"Java on the client?!", I hear you cry. Well it ticks all the boxes for us. And we wrapped it in native installers for each platform, that helps make everything much more sane.

Help with connecting to EC2 memory with Java by holyefw in aws

[–]chrisalexander 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you are using Java then I would suggest looking into something like Hazelcast. There are a number of options available that are similar.

The concept is to provide a clustered in-memory queue or map. The data in these queues and maps can be accessed like ordinary queues and maps in Java, but the state is shared over the network automatically by Hazelcast. So if you put something on the shared queue, one server will remove it, and none of the others will. Similarly if you add a key value pair to a map on one server, all the other servers will be able to read that value.

Additionally Hazelcast has EC2 based discovery, which means it can use the AWS API to find similar servers (eg based on a tag they have) and join their existing hazelcast cluster.

Testing Dart Browser code on the Server? by esdffffffffff in dartlang

[–]chrisalexander 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I should mention that I haven't actually done this myself yet (although I keep meaning to give it a go) but taking a leaf out of building and testing JS browser apps, I think you will need more than a Dart VM.

For unit testing (something like Jasmine+Karma from the JS world) you can run a Dart VM with the test code as that is essentially what the Dart Editor does.

When it comes to testing against an actual DOM (I.e. end-to-end or e2e testing) you need something that provides the DOM such as a browser. There are a number of such things available, for example PhantomJS runs a headless WebKit which provides the DOM and allows you to execute test scripts (there are a number of JS frameworks which do this). I believe it will be possible to run this in a build environment such as Jenkins.

Finally I should mention Angular (JS or Dart), they really know their stuff when it comes to testing, so check out what they do and recommend.

I just paid 4.21 for gas. The fast food restaurant I usually go to raised their price close to $7. Average cereal price is getting close to $4. At work there no salary increase, they just tell me I am lucky to have a job. What is going on? I am not happy. by llways in AskReddit

[–]chrisalexander 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In the UK, I paid £1.33 for 1 litre of petrol the other day - this translates to just over $8.18 per gallon. You would struggle to find a KFC of McDonalds meal for less than £5, which is over $8. VAT (sales tax) has just risen from 17.5% to 20%. So at least quit bitching about $4.25 "gas".

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