Recently the team (which includes a couple of very experienced Java devs) and I came across a few JVM gotchas that I wanted to write down just in case anyone else comes across them and is scratching their heads. Here’s the first one:

Just my 2 cents for anyone who is interested in using Github for feature branching, pull requests, a rebase workflow, and as a bonus- an online backup of your work. This process has treated me pretty well over the past few years across multiple teams and projects.

The other day my co-worker and I stumbled across an interesting find in MySQL— and by ‘stumbled’ I mean spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out why some tests weren’t passing. Here’s what was happening:

The problem

Today I spent a frustrating amount of time trying to figure out why a data conversion task was failing. The task I was running takes about 15 minutes, and at about 10 minutes in it would choke and the error I received included the following message:

When I first started learning how to develop software I was fortunate enough to be paired with a mentor right off the bat. Then only six months after writing my first lines of code I was asked to mentor other beginners. What I did was probably a little more teaching than mentoring- but it was probably one of the best things I could have done. Not only is the enthusiasm of beginners infectious, but at that time I even felt like I was getting more out of it than the apprentices. The act of teaching everything I had learned forced me to be comfortable enough with those ideas that I could speak about them— and the questions my apprentices asked forced me to dive deeper so that I could provide the right answer.

Developing software is all about problem solving. At the highest level we hope our software solves a problem for our customers and users. At the next level down we’re solving the problem of creating a system that moves data from here, does something with it, and move it over there. Below that we’re solving a problem by implementing sort of algorithm, and at the bottom level we’re solving the problem of properly telling a machine what to do with our functions and data.

From the department of fool me twice, shame on me. I ran into this issue on my laptop about a month ago and blanked on the solution when I had the same issue on my desktop.

TL;DR If you’re on OS X, installed Postgres with homebrew, and are receiving errors asking if your Postgres server is running locally and accepting connections, check that your PGHOST is configured for localhost

Over the past several months we’ve been internationalizing the Rails app that I’ve been working on. There are all sorts of lessons we’ve learned from rolling an app out to 17 countries (and counting)— and suffice it to say that Biggie wasn’t wrong when he said: “Mo countries, Mo problems” (or something to that effect).