At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. Java 8 Friday Every Friday, we’re showing you a couple of nice new tutorial-style Java 8 features, which take advantage of lambda expressions, extension methods, and … Continue reading Java 8…
2 May 2014
In early 2013, Thoughtworks was invited to speak at a series of guest lectures for an Australian university, targeting undergraduate and graduate students of Computer Science and Information Technology.
1 May 2014
SoundCloud is pleased to introduce a new major version of the SoundCloud JavaScript SDK. In version 2, we’ve rewritten much of the internal…
Aspiring to speak at conferences and to share knowledge with others seems like a reasonable thing for a professional to do. So, it was quite odd to me to find that there were so few women going out and speaking at conferences from Thoughtworks India, as compared to men. Is it possible that women were just less keen on speaking?…
We are at a critical juncture in the evolution of human society. We can continue to live in a world where many of us are nothing more than cogs in a machine, or we can choose to fashion a society that values the potential and power and beauty of every individual. Advancements in automation and computerization are part of the…
30 Apr 2014
Subscribe to this newsletter here Tweet of the Day Our customers, users, and followers are sharing their love for jOOQ to the world. Here are: Santiago M. Mola who appreciates jOOQ’s affinity to SQL features and its correctness @LucioIO Something I love about @JavaOOQ is that it (correctly) supports almost any type or feature supported by … Continue reading jOOQ…
What is the role of an analyst in Continuous Delivery? Does the concept and practice exist only in development and DevOps? If not, then what do analysts have to do with it? To answer these questions, let's first think about what Continuous Delivery represents: it is about building quality right into your product or application; it is about enabling more…
Updated from 2 April 2014 Agile Analytics is a blend of sophisticated analytics techniques, agile delivery methods and lean learning principles, but doing it well involves a bit more than that. I recently gave a talk in Singapore where I outlined the essential elements of effective agile analytics. I summarize these seven dimensions here, which accompanies this slide deck from…
Typically in organizations, there are multiple projects and products in development. Many organizations like to have a common Test Automation solution across these products in an effort to standardize the framework. However, this is not such a good idea! Each product should be tested using the tools and technologies that are "right" for it. Yet, these different products should talk…
29 Apr 2014
PHP developers are makers at heart. The core strength of PHP has always been in creating a tight feedback cycle between developers and their audiences. That strength is the reason why PHP powers so many of the world’s biggest and best web properties such as Facebook and Etsy. But as developers of those and similar […] The post Introducing the…
The history of PHP is the history of the web. Long-time developers will remember how PHP changed the universe of web development. PHP brought two key innovations to the table when it first launched. First, it was interpreted, which meant you could edit a file in place, then refresh the page and see the result. […] The post PHP –…
If anything at all, our jOOQ talks at various JUGs and conferences have revealed mostly one thing: Java developers don’t know SQL. And it isn’t even necessarily our fault. We’re just not exposed to SQL nowadays. But consider this: We developers (or our customers) are paying millions of dollars every year to Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, … Continue reading NoSQL? No,…
User Experience (UX) may come by many names, but the importance of it is indisputable. It is a good idea to focus on the person who will be using whatever it is you are making. UX should be an insurance to minimise the fail rate of your product by telling you what will fail before you finish building it. If…
28 Apr 2014
I found that it’s pretty hard to have a project with high test coverage and fast build… if the tests are slow, people will feel the need to skip them to speed up the build, and will probably write fewer tests than they should, afraid that the build will become even slower. You go out for a walk and when…
Go aka golang is an amazing language but also a language that is really easy to learn due to its small scope. If you have some coding experience, you will be able to have fully working code in a matter of minutes otherwise you might want to read my free book (WIP). Very much like with many other programming languages,…
27 Apr 2014
Our current project uses JSF and CDI for the presentation layer. The business logic is encapsulated inside EJB with no-interface view as proposed by Adam Bien and others. I evaluated different alternatives for integration testing and ended up with Arquillian. For JSF/CDI based applications Arquillian is the best fit. As […] The post Doing integration tests with Arquillian and real…
We were counting down the days until Berlin Buzzwords on May 25, when we realised that it would be great if you came too! With that in mind…
25 Apr 2014
The announcement earlier this month of the “Heartbleed” bug (CVE-2014-0160) in OpenSSL once again focused attention on the technology used to secure communications on the Internet. Heartbleed was a very serious vulnerability and we moved as quickly as possible to patch systems and eliminate this threat on behalf of our customers. But security is not […] The post Beyond Heartbleed:…
The ability to instantly cancel a Direct Debit instruction is an important right for your customers.
Let's slice up beacon interactions Okay, so we know what beacons are and what they do - great. The next question is, what can we do with them? What kinds of interactions can we craft? That's the question my collaborator Nick Urban and I decided to pick apart. We sliced beacon interactions up, to show in a clear and non-technical…
Ozge Catalbas is the Tech Lead on the Humanitarian Software Program (HSP) at Thoughtworks; an initiative where we partner with humanitarian and social organizations, to provide voluntary software development and consulting services, pro-bono. Ozge is passionate about forming productive dev teams and delivering high quality software.
24 Apr 2014
The other day Apple released a major security update that fixes a number of terrifying things that can happen to your OS/X and iOS devices. You should install it. Not only does this fix a possible remote code execution vulnerability in the JPEG parser (!), it also patches a TLS/SSL protocol bug known as the “Triple Handshake” … Continue reading…
From my presentation at MLConf, one of the points I think is worth stressing again is how extremely well combining different algorithms works. In this case, we’re training machine learning algorithms on different data sets (playlists, play counts, sessions) and different objectives (least squares, max likelihood). Then we combine all the models using gradient boosted decision trees training on a…
23 Apr 2014
Keep on top of advance notice with six quick questions to ask yourself
On one of my first projects at Thoughtworks I found myself confronted with a legacy codebase. The tech stack was a Drupal with lots of PHP to customize the CMS with Java based Selenium 1.0 tests on the side. It was not created to test the app comprehensively, and there were gaping holes. The Selenium 1.0 suite consisted of a…
The International Space Apps is a 36-hour hackathon that takes place in numerous cities all over the world (including the TW Office in Porto Alegre).
22 Apr 2014
But only if your family is code. So this is a bit of a terrible blog post because a) it’s about a really obscure atrocity that happens in C++ (as opposed to the common atrocities that happen in C++ on the regs) and b) there are not enough funnies in the world to make up for it. I recommend skipping…
21 Apr 2014
The Heartbleed bug was really bad for OpenSSL - it let you ask a server a simple question like "How are you" and then have the server tell you anything it wants (password data, private keys that could be used to decrypt all traffic), and the server would have no idea it was happening. A […]
In a previous post we introduced a learning model called Probably Approximately Correct (PAC). We saw an example of a concept class that was easy to learn: intervals on the real line (and more generally, if you did the exercise, axis-aligned rectangles in a fixed dimension). One of the primary goals of studying models of learning is to figure out…
My first encounter with agile software development was working with Kent Beck at the dawn of Extreme Programming. One of the things that impressed me about that project was the way we went about planning. This included an approach to estimating which was both lightweight yet more effective than what I'd seen before. Over a decade has now passed, and…
Recently the Women’s DIY Series hosted the successful launch of a new event series called Women's DIY: Learn Together, Develop It Yourself in the Thoughtworks Chicago office. Founded by two Thoughtworks programmers, the series aims to get more women engaged in programming, with a goal of providing a supportive environment where women can work together and grow their development skills.…
The future of the Internet will be discussed at the NetMundial conference in São Paulo, Brazil 23-24 April 2014, which will bring together 800 participants, including representatives of 70 governments. The purpose of NetMundial is to craft a set of high-level global principles (a ‘Bill of Rights’ for the Internet) and a roadmap that will determine the future of global…
20 Apr 2014
Introduction This post presents one technique for installing and using multiple versions of Go on a machine. This is a technique I use often as we have standardised on Go 1.2.1 for developing Juju, but develop on the tip of Go itself. You may find this technique useful for do comparisons between various Go versions for […]
18 Apr 2014
Voice of the Heart - The app that's given 6,000 people a voice It all began with a technology competition. Building an app that would have an impact in society got a few us thinking. We came up with ‘Voice of the Heart’ – an app that uses voice recognition to aid people in the speech and hearing-impaired community communicate…
17 Apr 2014
Tina Vinod is the Operations Lead for the Social Impact Program and a mentor for the Humanitarian Software Program (HSP). In this blog, she shares details of the HSP program, it's goals and projects currently on this program.
If you are developing an AngularJS application, use Protractor to test it! Why? Protractor is an end-to-end testing framework for AngularJS applications and works as a solution integrator - combining powerful tools and technologies such as NodeJS, Selenium, webDriver, Jasmine, Cucumber and Mocha. It has a bunch of customizations from Selenium to easily create tests for AngularJS applications.
Thoughtworks Retail recently hosted a dinner in New York City for top retail executives in the local market. Our guests included a mix of IT, Digital, eComm and Customer Experience executives from major retail companies. We enjoyed a great evening of cocktails, dinner and engaging discussion around innovation and how retailers are innovating in an era of continual business disruption.
16 Apr 2014
Subscribe to this newsletter here Tweet of the Day Our customers, users, and followers are sharing their love for jOOQ to the world. Here are: Mahmud who cannot wait to make more magic with jOOQ. https://twitter.com/bigthingist/status/455985890125287424 Peter Kopfler who, after hearing about jOOQ and SQL in Vienna is thrilled to take a deep dive into the … Continue reading jOOQ…
It's one of the most confusing industry terms at the moment... 'big data' what does that really mean? Is there a classification model? What happens if it's big but not quite big enough...is that not-so-big-data?
David Johnston Talks Big Data in the Big Apple
Ok, so what is it? It's a proximity system. It means that apps on your smartphone, tablet, wearable or other computing device can respond to fine-grained distance readings from 'beacons'. Beacons are small, cheap physical devices that you can place around some location to represent the things you want to read distance from.
15 Apr 2014
The open source community was shocked to learn Tuesday that millions of lines of source code had gone missing from Github.com, a popular online version control website. Github stores source code in "reposotories", which are big chunks of code that can be edited by Github members. Most version control websites will keep a small portion […]
Haven’t we all been wondering: How can I do this? I have these data in Excel and I want to group / sort / assign / combine … While you could probably pull up a Visual Basic script doing the work or export the data to Java or any other procedural language of choice, why … Continue reading How can…
At the beginning of Thoughtworks University we were told to establish four goals. One of my goals was to find out how Thoughtworks can be so different from other IT and software development companies, yet still be able to maintain a very successful business. The purpose of this blog is to answer that question. I will, as briefly as possible,…
If continuous delivery and Lean enterprise practices are going to be adopted in the large, then we need to bring those techniques to all parts of our enterprise footprint, not just the greenfield systems.
I’m sure this situation sounds familiar. Well-known bank has to replace your cash card. They don’t schedule the delivery, despite giving clear instructions repeatedly to the customer support representative. Thus you miss the delivery and have to make a fresh request that takes 4 working days to process. You then try the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system to change the…
Our Thoughtworks San Francisco office kicked off a series of quarterly Technology Radar events to bring together technologists, decision makers, and practitioners. The Technology Radar San Francisco Events are an informal conference for professional software developers, technologists, and practitioners organized by key leadership within Thoughtworks.
At the Thoughtworks San Francisco office, we have a deep commitment to support humanitarian causes and be a force for good in the Social Justice arena. We hosted the first Hack for Democracy hackathon to support technologists who seek openly to build technology for nonpartisan political oriented projects and initiatives.
14 Apr 2014
On a Friday in April, the lines for Space Mountain and Thunder Valley did not exceed 10 minutes all day. Astro Blasters twice had 4 people in line. The price is $60, which is ~$30 cheaper than Anaheim. It was about 80 degrees during the day and 70 at night. Also when you exit Disneyland […]
Last time we saw the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, and discussed the discrete logarithm problem and the related Diffie-Hellman problem, which form the foundation for the security of most protocols that use elliptic curves. Let’s continue our journey to investigate some more protocols. Just as a reminder, the Python implementations of these protocols are not at all meant for practical…
13 Apr 2014
A few weeks ago I had a talk with one of my co-workers in which he said he had not evolved technically and personally in the past months. Aside from the fact that I had a different view it made me think of my own current situation. Which insights did […] The post Things I have learned in the last…
12 Apr 2014
Just spent a day at MLConf where I was talking about how we do music recommendations. There was a whole range of great speakers (actually almost 2/3 women which was pretty cool in itself). Here are my slides: Justin Basilico from Netflix talked about how they deliver a personalized start page using lots of ranking Claudia Perlich also had a…
11 Apr 2014
Cloudformation is a powerful tool for building large, coordinated clusters of AWS resources. It has a sophisticated API, capable of supporting many different enterprise use-cases and scaling to thousands of stacks and resources. However, there is a downside: the JSON interface for specifying a stack can be cumbersome to manipulate, especially as your organization grows […]
Looks like everyone had a blast at bv.io this year! Thank yous go out to the conference speakers and hackathon participants for making this year outstanding. Here are some tweets and images from the conference: RT @bazaarbrett: Hackathon is kicking off, very glad to be here! #bvhackathon pic.twitter.com/q8dnfqlQxh — Bazaarvoice (@Bazaarvoice) April 2, 2014 https://twitter.com/bentonporter/status/451362916181090304 […]
ORM Cheatsheet is a useful website that serves as a quick reference guide for developers struggling to remember how to use common PHP ORM libraries like Doctrine 2 and Propel. It provides examples for annotations, relationships, and configuration.
We love seeing our customers’ successful and gaining recognition for the amazing businesses they are building. So, as you could imagine, we were thrilled to learn that a Heroku customer was featured on ABCs Shark Tank last Friday, with two more being featured over the next couple weeks. Plated – Aired 4/4 at 9pm ET […] The post Congratulations to…
On Monday, April 7th, 2014, a major security vulnerability in OpenSSL was made public. The vulnerability was filed as CVE-2014-0160 and…
We’ve taken some time to bring all our developer resources together into a single site. In doing so, we’ve reorganized the layout to make…
The Age of Turbulence is upon us The telegraph took about 100 years to reach one billion users. SMS took about 20 years to achieve the same number. WhatsApp took just about 2 years to get to one billion users. In 1958, the average years a company stayed in the Standard and Poor’s 500 list was 61 years. In 1980,…
Last September, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s stunning revelations about the scale of global mass surveillance, President Dilma Roussef of Brazil made an impassioned speech at the United Nations calling for a major break from the status quo on the current systems of Internet governance. As a result, the world is coming to Sao Paulo, Brasil on April 23-24…
10 Apr 2014
We are really honored to be a part of PyCon again this year. We have a big booth in the expo hall and a bunch of people who are really looking forward to attending and who are there to answer questions, hack on code, troubleshoot, or shoot the …. Enter to win: While you are […] The post PyCon Montreal…
How many times has the following happened to you? You go to a web site and it asks you to create an account. You fill out a form with all the obvious fields and hit submit. The page refreshes and shows you the form again. Phone Number is required Well, that’s annoying. There was no indication that the site needed…
The battle over freedom of information is one of the leading issues of our time, and the San Francisco office is part of the movement to protect our right to dissent, privacy, and information access. Between regularly scheduled internal meets and more focused events with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading organizations in the United States on…
I was on Sass Bites this week!
9 Apr 2014
The author received 3 invites to try Atom.io, a new text editor built by GitHub using Node.js. They find it promising but slower than SublimeText. The post shares the invites with readers who follow the author on social media and comment.
On the TIOBE index, Java and C have been sharing the #1 and #2 rank for a long time now, and with the recent GA release of the JDK 8, things are not going to get any worse for our community. Java simply rocks! And it’s the best platform to build almost any of your … Continue reading Java Rocks…
I am the poster child for writer’s block. I can’t write the #ifdef header guard correctly for a brand new C++ class, I don’t remember the order of the public static void main args incantation in Java, and for the life of me, I can’t start working on an empty presentation. Not even if you promise me pizza. (Please promise…
You’ve created an open source Android app. The source code is freely available to anybody on GitHub; you might even have a few contributors and followers. You’ve set up a keystore and a private key to sign and release your app. Now, how do you set up app signing in Gradle? And more importantly, how do you minimize the risk…
8 Apr 2014
Yesterday the OpenSSL Project released an update to address the CVE-2014-0160 vulnerability, nicknamed “Heartbleed.” This serious vulnerability affects a substantial number of applications and services running on the internet, including Heroku. All Heroku users should update their passwords as a precautionary measure. If you are currently running the SSL Endpoint add-on, you should re-key and […] The post OpenSSL Heartbleed…
Ouch. (Logo from heartbleed.com) I start every lecture in my security class by asking the students to give us any interesting security or crypto news they’ve seen recently, preferably with a focus on vulnerabilities. The start of my last class was pretty lame, which meant either (1) we’d finally learned how to make our crypto software … Continue reading Attack…
This post is the answer to yesterday’s brainteaser. As a reminder, I was asking what purpose this code might have: public static class Extensions { public static void Add<T>(this ICollection<T> source, T item) { source.Add(item); } } There are plenty of answers, varying from completely incorrect (sorry!) to pretty much spot on. As many people … Continue reading Extension methods,…
Welcome to Part 4 of our series where we interview “disruptive” testers who inject fresh perspective, leadership and enthusiasm in the testing community. Today we chat with Matthew Heusser, who combines his testing expertise and refreshing writing style as a prolific writer, trainer and presenter.
Until I got to Hyderabad in the early morning of January 24, I didn’t know much about the Swecha* Freedom Fest. All I knew was that we would talk about Defending the Free Internet (DFI) and free software.
7 Apr 2014
Just a really quick one today… What’s the point of this code? Does it have any point at all? public static class Extensions { public static void Add<T>(this ICollection<T> source, T item) { source.Add(item); } } Bonus marks if you can work out what made me think about it. I suggest you ROT-13 answers to … Continue reading Quick brainteaser…
This is the list we’ve all been waiting for. The top 10 productivity booster techs for programmers that – once you’ve started using them – you can never do without them any longer. Here it is: 1. Git Before, there were various version control systems. Better ones, worse ones. But somehow they all felt wrong … Continue reading The Top…
6 Apr 2014
I can't remember the last time I went a whole day without running into a software bug. For weeks, I couldn't invite anyone to Facebook events due to a bug that caused the invite button to not display on the invite screen. Google Maps has been giving me illegal and sometimes impossible directions ever since I moved to a small…
5 Apr 2014
With Agile software development moving from the fringes to mainstream to enterprise-wide, a dilemma with many contradictions emerge - how do you scale Agile? Much like “distributed” seems to be contrary to “Agile”, “scale” also fits in rather uncomfortably with “Agile”. The SAFe framework has its fair share of criticism, but what are the alternatives? Who better to inject some…
4 Apr 2014
It’s been a scandalously long time since I’ve blogged about C#, and now that the first C# 6 preview bits are available, that feels like exactly the right thing to set the keys clacking again. Don’t expect anything massively insightful from me just yet; I’d heard Mads and Dustin (individually) talk about some new features … Continue reading C# 6:…
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. Java 8 Friday Every Friday, we’re showing you a couple of nice new tutorial-style Java 8 features, which take advantage of lambda expressions, extension methods, and … Continue reading Java 8…
3 Apr 2014
The world’s first suicide prevention app designed especially for use by Indigenous people on mobile phones or tablet devices is on trial usage in Australia. Suicide rates are substantially higher in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, accounting for 4.2% of all Indigenous deaths compared to the 1.6% national suicide rate. Can an app help save lives and begin to…
2 Apr 2014
Here is a fun puzzle. Suppose we have a group of 10 men and 10 women, and each of the men has sorted the women in order of their preference for marriage (that is, a man prefers to marry a woman earlier in his list over a woman later in the list). Likewise, each of the women has sorted the…
subscribe to this newsletter here Tweet of the Day Our customers, users, and followers are sharing their love for jOOQ to the world. Here are: Arturo Tena who simply loves jOOQ 3.3, and expresses this with a creative transformation of our version numbering scheme: https://twitter.com/arturotena/status/434502197217202176 Florin T.Pătraşcu who cannot stop integrating jOOQ with MicroMVC, because he discovers more … Continue…
In Part I of "How Can the Cloud Improve your App's Quality?", we examined how the cloud helps with Performance, Features, Reliability and Conformance. In Part II we’ll describe the positive effects of the cloud on Durability, Serviceability, Aesthetics and Perceived Quality.
“Women who want to work in this field still feel that it is weird or that men may not accept them. This needs to change,” writes Thoughtworks’ CTO.
1 Apr 2014
For the occasion of today’s date, I’ve just invented a fun game. The Spring API Bingo! How does it work? Let us write the following little piece of code: So far so good. We could use more terms if we wanted to but for now, these will suffice. Now, let’s shuffle the above list and … Continue reading Spring API…
Scrolling through the Discover page on Spotify the other day it occurred to me that the album is in fact a fairly strong visual proxy for what kind of content you can expect from it. I started wondering if the album cover can in fact be used for recommendations. For many obvious reasons this is a kind of ridiculous idea,…
Continuous Delivery (CD) is often thought to be within the purview of tech practitioners - developers, testers, operations, delivery managers, etc. However, the industry is fast realizing that CD is actually more of a business decision. CD can be the game changer to help the organization stay a step ahead by delivering value to the customer reliably and frequently. CD…
31 Mar 2014
So far in this series we’ve seen elliptic curves from many perspectives, including the elementary, algebraic, and programmatic ones. We implemented finite field arithmetic and connected it to our elliptic curve code. So we’re in a perfect position to feast on the main course: how do we use elliptic curves to actually do cryptography? History As the reader has heard…
Reddit’s /r/ProgrammerHumor has recently treated us to this politically incorrect and quite childish little Open Source rant Obviously, like most “discussions” on reddit and specifically those discussions about Open Source, things got quickly very serious with people referring to Richard Stallman and how these critiques are childish and immature and what’s-wrong-with-our-industry™ etc. Let’s not delve … Continue reading Open Source…
Stats: a preamble I’ve been reading too much about March Madness brackets, so I thought I had to run some numbers around here like the cool kids do. Get your umbrella out, it’s about to rain cold facts. In the history of time, Chromium has had 205,095 commits made by 1,943 contributors representing 7,431,088 lines of code. In the last…
30 Mar 2014
Learn how to reset a lost MySQL root password by restarting the server with disabled security checks. This allows resetting the password directly in the database. Useful when locked out but reduces security temporarily.
29 Mar 2014
This post is a follow up to Friday’s post on comments in Go. Keith Rarick and Nate Finch pointed out that I had neglected to include two important practical use cases. Build tags I’ve previously written about how to use // +build tags to perform conditional compilation. In light of the previous post it’s probably […]
28 Mar 2014
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. Java 8 Friday Every Friday, we’re showing you a couple of nice new tutorial-style Java 8 features, which take advantage of lambda expressions, extension methods, and … Continue reading Java 8…
This is a quick post to discuss the rules of comments in Go. To quickly recap, Go comments come in two forms // everything from the double slash to the end of line is a comment /* everything from the opening slash star, to the closing one is a comment */ As the first form […]