Rob Janssen

All | Unread | Read

5 Reasons to Use Protocol Buffers Instead of JSON For Your Next Service

Service-Oriented Architecture has a well-deserved reputation amongst Ruby and Rails developers as a solid approach to easing painful growth by extracting concerns from large applications. These new, smaller services typically still use Rails or Sinatra, and use JSON to communicate over HTTP.

The Open Closed Principle

In 1988 Bertrand Meyer defined one of the most important principles of software engineering. The Open Closed Principle (OCP). In his book Object Oriented Software Construction[1] he said: This definition is obviously dated. Nowadays many languages don't require that modules be compiled.

What you didn't learn in college because you didn't use mainframes

Andy Lester's got a great article over at the New Relic site which makes me realize how lucky I was in college. We did not have a version control system at all; we ended up using generation data sets and meticulous tape backups to manage our source code.

The Hamburger Icon

When common practices and trends should be questioned.Whether you want to call it a hamburger, navigation or menu icon, that dear little thing looks like it’s here to stay. It’s our own fault, we created it.We try to question its use, some have even gone as far as to test it.

Cancelling an async HTTP request Task sends TCP RESET packet

Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Anti-pattern: parallel collections (Note that I'm not talking about "processing collections in parallel, which is definitely not an anti-pattern...) I figured it was worth starting to blog about anti-patterns I see frequently on Stack Overflow.

how I try to: Be a T-shaped programmer

Every programmer should strive to be T-shaped. While bodybuilders work hard in the gym just to have a V-shaped body, programmers train hard to become T-shaped.

An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence: Concepts

The words artificial intelligence can conjure a wide array of thoughts and emotions. For the uninitiated and everyone who is not familiar, or simply has not dared to dive or even glance over this field, artificial intelligence can at times sound intimidating and perhaps a bit scary.

Passwords are still an anti-pattern

Passwords continue to harm the web. We need to rethink our approach to authentication. We were warned Nearly seven years ago Jeremy Keith wrote an eloquent article on why passwords are an anti-pattern.

A Better ID Generator For PostgreSQL

When developers think about a globally-unique identifier, they usually think of UUIDs (or GUIDs) and will then create a table with a GUID as a primary key. This is problematic if your system grows or your writes/second increase.

This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.

This list is compiled from my Pocket list.