Caveats of HttpURLConnection
Does this piece of code look ok to you? Looks good – it opens a connection, reads from it, closes the input stream, releases the connection, and that’s it. ButContinue reading
Open-Sourcing My Music Composition Algorithm
Less than two years ago I wrote about the first version of my algorithm for music composition. Since then computoser.com got some interest and the algorithm was incrementally improved. Now,Continue reading
Get Rid of the URL Pollution
You want to copy the URL of a nice article/video/picture you’ve just opened and send it to friends in skype chats, whatsapp, other messengers or social networks. And you realizeContinue reading
Generating equals(..), hashCode() and toString()
You most probably need to override hashCode(), equals(..) and toString() – I won’t go into details when and why, but you need that (ok, just a reminder – always implementContinue reading
RabbitMQ in Multiple AWS Availability Zones
When working with AWS, in order to have a highly-available setup, once must have instances in more than one availability zone (AZ ≈ data center). If one AZ dies (whichContinue reading
You Probably Don’t Need a Message Queue
I’m a minimalist, and I don’t like to complicate software too early and unnecessarily. And adding components to a software system is one of the things that adds a significantContinue reading
Make Tests Fail
This is about a simple testing technique that is probably obvious, but I’ll share it anyway. In case you are not following TDD, when writing tests, make them fail, inContinue reading
Integration Tests for External Services
Our systems often depend on 3rd party services (They may even be services internal to the company that we have no control on). Such services include Social Networks exposing APIs,Continue reading
Algorithmic Music Influenced by Tweets
Every now and then I make some addition to my algorithmic music composer. And now I decided to allow users to hear music that is based on their tweets. ItContinue reading
Scheduling Repeated Tasks in Android
A somewhat common usecase for android applications is to have them launched when the phone is started, and execute some piece of code periodically. Sounds straightforward, but there are someContinue reading