About This Weblog

I develop software, something I find endlessly fascinating. My current position requires me to write blog-like articles for the company's website, this blog contains all of the articles that don't quite fit with the corporate blog's topc, enterprise search. You can learn more on the about page.

Pages

Bishop: Makes Your Web Service Shiny

Posted on 07 May 2012
A couple of months ago I was working with another developer, he was building a web application around a web service that I had just finished writing. We were going over the API documentation that I put together and he straight-out asked me: “What happens if I send it something... read more

Why Is My Web Service API Crappy?

Posted on 02 Apr 2012
I knew that I hard written a crappy web service API but why was it so crappy? Was it because, no matter what, it only returned JSON data? Was it because the arguments were passed via their positions in the URL? Was it because the version of the API was... read more

All Your HBase Are Belong to Clojure

Posted on 12 Jan 2012
I’m sure you’ve heard a variation on this story before… So I have this web crawler and it generates these super-detailed log files, which is great ‘cause then we know what it's doing but it’s also kind of bad ‘cause when someone wants to know why the crawler did this... read more

Java Doesn't Need to Be So Bad

Posted on 04 Dec 2011
I do a lot of Java coding and I enjoy it. I admit that there is a lot of typing, often a lot of boilerplate and getting even simple tasks done can involve too much work. Most of the tools that try to fix these problems trade one moment saved... read more

Blogging With Emacs

Posted on 09 Oct 2011
I don't want to waste time explaining why I use Emacs all day, every day, and eschew more traditional development environments. Either you already use Emacs and I'm preaching to the choir or you don't and are very unlikely to read this article. I will keep it short: Emacs is... read more