I recently found myself writing some code to integrate two disparate platforms. One of these systems is Java based and the other, while not written in Java, offers a Java API. I’ll call these systems Foo and Bar, respectively.

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I find that swipe gestures for navigating between screens in a mobile app quite nice.

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Have you ever worked with Rails’ migrations? They make database changes a breeze, don’t they? While every software release doesn’t necessarily involve a migration, when one does happen to make use of one, I’m always pleased on how easily things work out.

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Did you ever learn that select * from table in RDBMS-land is bad? Of course, you did! If you’re only looking for the email address of a user and not the other 15 columns worth of data, then why ask for that data and incur a penalty? The query select email from user where user_id = 1; is far more efficient for the database and the corresponding application that issued it, because there is less data to fetch and consume.

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We run a farm of Redis instances for storing real time analytics. Because Redis stores objects in memory, it happens to be an extremely fast way to retrieve data; thus, most of our charts and graphs pull data from various Redis instances that contain desired data.

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The fourth article in IBM developerWorks’ series Mobile for the Masses has been published! This copasetic article shows you how to take the Overheard Word demo app up a level with a JSON-based word engine and some prebaked, swipe-gesture functionality.

As the article summary states:

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One of my Android apps recently suffered from a nefariously ugly UI glitch that, embarrassingly, a user reported to me. Strangely, this phenomenon did not surface itself in local testing on either emulators or devices when I first wrote the app; nevertheless, I was able to reproduce the error after the bug report came in. I suspect that recent updates in the Android platform might have exacerbated the issue for my app as I’m fairly certain I never saw it before.

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All documents in a MongoDB collection have a primary key dubbed _id. This field is automatically assigned to a document upon insert, so there’s rarely a need to provide it. What’s interesting about the _id field is that it is time based. That is, the underlying type of _id, which is ObjectId, is a 12-byte BSON type, and 4 of those bytes represent the seconds since Unix epoch.

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Have a highly specific, yet custom validation for a particular field on one of your Rails model objects? Don’t want to create a ActiveModel::Validator type? Not a problem!

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Long running web requests are bad.

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