Several years ago, I bought one of those Christmas trees with lights already strung up from a big box store. Every December, I go to the basement where it’s stored, dust it off, set it up in our living room, …
In a REST API system, what should the DELETE API return if the resource being deleted doesn’t exist: “200 OK” or “404 Not Found”? It seems like a minor design choice, but we had a surprisingly contentious debate over the …
In Part 1 of this series, we showed how a solution to the puzzle could be represented simply by the sequence of 12 pieces in the order we place them, given an agreed upon strategy of where to place pieces. …
One morning, Grady walks into the office and leaves a couple of wooden puzzles on the shared table in the Data Management Team area. Many of us were nerd-sniped that day. This is a tale of how one single puzzle …
This just in! A controversial new policy introduced this week has sparked chaos within Vena’s engineering ranks. A faction of dissenters, calling themselves “Team Spaces” has barricaded themselves up within the Glass Cube, the section of the office normally …
I come into work one morning, and I hear about a new customer bug. A data import failed, with this technical-looking error message:
Document size of 16990947 is larger than maximum of 16777216.
We’ve seen this error message before; it’s …
When I started as a server developer at Vena in 2013, we didn’t have test-driven development. Sure, we designed our codebase to be testable by using dependency injection from the start, with the expectation of writing unit tests with mocks. …
Using a Java framework like Dropwizard and an ORM like Hibernate, it’s quite easy to write a REST server in a completely object-oriented way. By defining entity classes, you can use the same objects from the incoming HTTP request, through …
When you’re running a cloud service like we do here at Vena, uptime is very important. We run blue-green deployments and we strive to make all database schema changes backwards compatible, so server upgrades require no downtime and rollbacks are …
