Streams in node are awesome. I’ve heard one of the core node contributors say, “if you’re not using streams, you’re doing it wrong”. Why are streams awesome? I’m glad you asked.

• improve performance for large data sets—stream from source to response without buffering it all in memory
• improve perceived responsiveness—start responding as soon as any data is available, rather than waiting for it all
• clean service composition pattern—make a request to another service and stream its response back to the user, filtering or modifying it in some way in the process

However, streaming in node isn’t straightforward. This is more true with the introduction of Stream2, aka “new streams”, since module writers try to support both old and new streams.

I ran into this challenge the other day. After hours of debugging, I realized that mixing stream modes was the cause and I somehow stumbled onto a stupid simple solution. Continued…

Ever wonder about the best patterns for the design, deployment, and monitoring of cloud applications? This presentation describes the current best practices used at BrightTag. Its from a talk given with two colleagues last year at CloudConnect.

I was recently tasked with fighting spam coming from contact forms on a website that uses Salesforce web-to-lead feature.

The contact form in question had previously posted to another PHP page which checked for a hidden field with a known value and, if the received value matches the known value, emailed the lead to the team. This is a very basic but effective spam deterrent, as bots tend to change the value of the field. But then the form was redone to post directly to Salesforce with all the data Salesforce needs to create a lead. While this resulted in a much simpler lead-creation process, it also resulted in a lot of spam as the “spam detection” facility was no longer used.

As I was rolling up my developer sleeves to write a simple PHP proxy to do spam detection and then post from PHP to Salesforce, I stumbled on this bit of documentation from Salesforce on their web-to-lead feature:

Salesforce runs field validation rules before creating records submitted via Web-to-Lead and only creates records that have valid values.

Inspired, I decided to try a pure-Salesforce spam deterrent hack. Continued…

Over the last year, I’ve ran into a number of cases where refactoring led to a generic abstract base class that accepted its parameter type class in its constructor. Something like this-

public abstract class BaseClass<T> {
    private final Class<T> type;
    protected BaseClass(Class<T> type) {
        this.type = type;
    }
}
 
public class ConcreteClass extends BaseClass<String> {
    public ConcreteClass() {
        super(String.class);
    }
}

Note the duplication of the type in the generic parameter declaration and in the call to the superclass constructor. Sadly, this is the usual workaround pattern.

Until Guava, finding the parameter type of a generic wasn’t easy Continued…

A friend of mine recently asked about my process when I was searching for a job. Although I briefly described my system, I’m afraid I really didn’t give the time to do it justice. This post is my penance.

When I was preparing to graduate in Fall 2011, I was undecided between building my own startup, joining the corporate world, and academia. Worse yet, I was undecided between four very different fields (education, architecture/engineering, computer science, and electrical engineering) and several focus areas in each (e.g., controls/robotics engineering, telecom/network engineering, software engineering, and sometimes computational cognitive science).  This breadth of interests means I had to cover a lot of ground to figure out my next step.

My first piece of advice: don’t make this mistake – narrow your search. But that’s probably obvious to most people. And if its not, just remember that your first job will not be your last, and in today’s society its common to switch between jobs and even fields numerous times during your life. I mean, I still have no idea what I want to do when I grow up

Now onward to the tactical stuff. My goal was to automate as much of the job search as possible. Continued…