A quirk learned after years of professional “What-if”ing — Several years ago in a blog post by James Hamilton (Distinguished Engineer at AWS), I read a phrase that has really stuck with me: “At scale, rare events aren’t rare.” Consider operating a service that has a nice-sounding 99.99% success rate, it fails “rarely”, only 0.01% of the time. If…

Last month (November 18, 2021) marked the one-year birthday of my family Minecraft Survival Multiplayer server. After over 1,500 hours of combined play time and 11 players at peak, I thought I’d share details on the setup and what I’ve learned so far hosting an active Minecraft server on AWS. …

This year marks my Seattle home’s 100st birthday! Hurray! 🥳🎉 Moving from a brand new high-rise downtown apartment to a 100-year-old house in the suburbs brought dozens of little challenges. One of the most interesting was configuring a home network capable of supporting the two nearly-always-on video conferencing feeds of…

In May 2021 I had a lumbar inter-body fusion at 30 years old to address a 15-year recurring disc herniation between my L5/S1 vertebrae. Going into the surgery I found information about the procedure was either too technical or academic to easily understand, too sales-oriented for a particular device or…

My wife and I have rented one- or two bedroom high-rise apartments in the Capitol Hill, South Lake Union, and Belltown neighborhoods in Seattle for the last eight years. After eighteen months of COVID lockdown enduring the downsides of urban apartment living (traffic, noise, crime, cost, crowds, little personal space)…

Working in enterprise software engineering for the last three years, I’ve started to recognize a few patterns in the projects, systems, and teams I’ve worked with. This second post in a series (see Part 1: Names and Types) touches on a non-technical but crucial topic: staying productive as a software developer. — Eliminate Unnecessary Distractions There’s a lot of recent research that suggests that programmers who are routinely interrupted are less productive than those who have blocks of uninterrupted working time. …

Working in enterprise software engineering for the last three years, I’ve started to recognize a few patterns in the projects, systems, and teams I’ve worked with. In my next few posts, I’ll describe some of those patterns, both technical and personal, and their impact on my life of a software engineer. — Names and Types “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” — Phil Karlton.

TestNG DataProviders are a powerful way to parameterize test classes, allowing you to run a single test method many times with different inputs. For example, say we’d like to assert that a group of web search engines have a ‘search box’ on their home page, but because they’re maintained by…