Sometimes we need to let users sign something electronically. Often people understand that as placing your handwritten signature on the screen somehow. Depending on the jurisdiction, that may be fine, or it may not be sufficient to just store the image. In Europe, for example, there’s the Regulation 910/2014 which defines what electronic signature are. […]
Most system have some sort of event logs – i.e. what has happened in the system and who did it. And sometimes it has a dual existence – once as an “audit log”, and once as event log, which is used to replay what has happened. These are actually two separate concepts: the audit log […]
It turns out that Spring Boot doesn’t mix well with the standard Spring MVC @EnableWebMvc. What happens when you add the annotation is that spring boot autoconfiguration is disabled. The bad part (that wasted me a few hours) is that in no guide you can find that explicitly stated. In this guide it says that […]
What’s a distributed cache? A solution that is “deployed” in an application (typically a web application) and that makes sure data is loaded from memory, rather than from disk (which is much slower), in order to improve performance and response time. That looks easy if the cache is to be used on a single machine […]
There’s an upcoming election in my country, and I’m a member of the governing body of one of the new parties. As we have a lot of focus on technology (and e-governance), our internal operations are also benefiting from some IT skills. The particular task at hand these days was to distribute a number of […]
Many libraries wrap some external communication. Be it a REST-like API, a message queue, a database, a mail server or something else. And therefore you have to have some timeout – for connecting, for reading, writing or idling. And sadly, many libraries have their default timeouts set to “0” or “-1” which means “infinity”. And […]
If you are building a service that stores sensitive data, your number one concern should be how to protect it. What IS sensitive data? There are some obvious examples, like medical data or bank account data. But would you consider a dating site database as sensitive data? Based on a recent leaks of a big […]
I thought for a while that object-oriented purism has died off. But it hasn’t – every now and then there’s an article that tries to tell us how evil setters and getters are, how bad (Java) annotations are, and how horrible and anti-object-oriented the anemic data model is (when functionality-only services act upon data-only objects) […]
The other day Joel Spolsky blogged a wonderful overview of the copyright issues with software companies in terms of its employees. The bottom line is: most companies have an explicit clause in their contracts which states that all intellectual property created by a developer is owned by the employer. This is needed, because the default […]
As a consequence of the Dyn attack many major websites were down, including twitter – the browsers could not resolve an IP address of the servers because the authoritative name server (Dyn) was down. Whether that could be addressed globally, I don’t know – there was an interesting discussion on reddit about my proposal to […]
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