I hit the one year mark of my blog while I was on thanksgiving break. I had intended to post on the day of the event, but I was busy with family in Minnesota and never got around to it. Back when I started this my intention was to try to write something about once a week. While I haven’t been completely successful with that when life intervenes and keeps me busy, I do see that I have exactly 52 posts so I at least averaged it over the year. All in all I would say this has been a successful venture for me. I learned a lot playing with some SEO things and seeing how things would show up in search engines from here. I was also able to learn a ton about SSL configuration of the site. On that note I have considered actually dropping TLS 1.0 support. While that would drop a bunch of old browsers I think consensus is that is the next protocol to fall since SSL 3 has pretty much been declared as insecure. Probably if I was a busy people would say not to do that since you want to be accessible to the maximum number of users, but since I maybe have 3 readers who are all technology people they would see no impact and it would allow me to crank the security down to the next level.

I am currently working on a project to move a bunch of data from SQL to Cassandra as the datastore. We have created a Cassandra Framework that looks very similar to the Spring Data JPA Framework that we use for SQL. Our Cassandra Framework we annotate data with @CassandraEntity and @CassandraRepository instead of @Entity and @Repository. For a time the data will live in both the SQL database as well as the Cassandra Cluster at the same time before we drop the SQL table. This will allow us to write to both tables and gradually switch over to the new cluster without as much risk if the cluster falls over.

I received an email a week or 2 ago that I was accepted into the EFF’s Let’s Encrypt Beta program to try out their new SSL certificate generation service. It uses the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol. I have been really interested in this program since it was announced as in the past when I have used Start SSL’s certificate system I found their whole validation system to be a little clunky. The idea of a nice automated program that does all the work for me sounded very appealing.

I am a big fan of the work Oliver Gierke has done in Spring Data. It is a framework I use daily at work and it really is amazing. A while back Greg Turnquist had posted something on Twitter against field injection. So I asked what was wrong with field injection and he pointed me to this post that Oliver had written about it.

This post is going to be my attempt to argue against Oliver’s position on the subject. It may wind up an epic failure, but if nothing else I figured it would help me think through my thoughts and assumptions on the issue and see if I can make an argument in favor of it. First head over to Oliver’s post on the topic and read it before you continue on.

I may have mentioned this before, but I love going to software conferences. When I got the email mentioning that Cassandra Days was coming to Dallas with a free 1 day conference on all things Cassandra, I signed up immediately. The event was sponsored by Datastax who sells a commercial version of Cassandra called Datastax Enterprise. They had 2 tracks an introductory track for people who are just exploring Cassandra, but haven’t yet taken it to production, and track 2 which was a deeper dive for people with experience with Cassandra.

I have been thinking for a while that a MacBook Pro looked like the ideal Java development machine. That being said I didn’t really want to drop $2500 to actually confirm my idea. I had suggested it at work, but corporate policy had us on Dell machines. Anyway last week I mentioned that I think the ideal developer setup would be buying us all MacBook Pros and one of my coworkers was kind enough to mention that there was an unused on the front end team occasionally needs to debug issues on the mobile devices but otherwise I could use it. Thus began my first week trying it out as a replacement machine.

I attended the kegs & code last night. It was a code challenge and party with cash prizes that was hosted by Saltt Ventures. I had never attended a code challenge or hack-a-thon or anything like that, but I figured it is good to get out of your comfort zone every now and then and try something new. Plus when they have free beer that is a pretty big perk. The beer was supplied by BrainDead Brewery which I hadn’t had prior to this event. The event started out as a happy hour with pizza and beer and then at some point we setup and the challenge began. It was a race to solve 10 problems in the quickest amount of time with first place getting $500, second $250 and third $100.

This is sort of old news now, but I haven’t had a chance to weigh in yet so I figured I would type my thoughts up anyway. On September 3rd Jetbrains announced a new licensing model. As you can imagine people immediately went crazy on twitter and 15 years of developer goodwill went up in smoke. What is the issue with the new model, the biggest problem with it is that they are moving from a perpetual model where you own that version of the IDE to a rental model ala Adobe where if you stop paying your tools stop working. Even more infuriating they came out like this was doing a favor for their developers and making it cheaper. In reality it only really makes it cheaper if you are say a consulting shop that is often switching between say pycharm, webstorm and idea. Then you can save some money over the cost of 3 perpetual licenses. For pretty much everyone else it is much worse.

I saw some friends on Facebook discussing Duolingo. While I had briefly heard of it I had never paid attention to it. So I decided to log on and check it out. It is pretty cool, as an intermediate level Spanish speaker I wanted to see how I did on their placement test and what the classes were like.

First off it is free which is a good way to get people interested. They follow the things that it seems like all the popular sites are doing and gamify learning a foreign language. So you see your friends, and you see how much experience they have earned in the last week, month and overall. You have a streak counter (like stack overflow) to track consecutive days you are practicing (which is also important for foreign language learning so you are getting repetition daily). When you level up role playing game style you receive their virtual currency which you can save up and use to buy bonus courses. And you see all your friends events which encourage you to keep working at it so you pass them in the rankings.

One of the most interesting Spring Boot features to me is the Spring Boot Actuator. I just love the concept of having all these restful endpoints to get useful operational data right out of the box. One issue I have had is that I don’t actually know all the endpoints just a few that I have used here and there. Today I saw a link to the Complete Guide for Spring Boot Actuator which is a pretty amazing post that covers everything and anything that you would want to know. The purpose of this post is just so I can go back and find this data later. If you are playing around with Actuators go and check out this post.