Software Engineering and Tech Consulting
Morning! Here’s a quick tip on camel-http and proper retry logic within error handling. Under the hood, camel-http uses Apache’s HttpClient, which provides its own retry logic by default. Adding Camel’s onException redeliveries on top of that ends up multiplying the attempts.
Continue reading “camel-http, Apache HttpClient, and Retry Attempts”
While working with a new client on some Camel-based microservices, I’ve been trying my best to keep a list of caveats and potential issues that occasionally pop up. Camel’s integration patterns and components are extremely powerful and include many bells and whistles. But unfortunately, that flexibility can also get in the way…
Without further ado, here’s the running list. I’ll come back and update these, periodically!
Continue reading “Apache Camel: Tips & Caveats (from the trenches)”
“Donor retention”, “donor management”, “donor relationship management”, and CRM. In the nonprofit realm, you’re likely well familiar with these tired terms. Of course, organizations certainly need to track donations, maintain donor contact info, and generate tax receipts. If you’re not already already setup with that baseline (digitally and automatically), please contact us — we’d love to help!
Once that foundation is established, it’s vital that nonprofits have an answer, strategy, and system in place to answer the following question:
If I needed to raise funding for a new asset, specific location, emergency need, campaign, or unique situation, could I identify past donors that would be most likely to contribute?
America’s Best Hope is a yearly, profound Christian leadership conference run by an Indianapolis nonprofit (Truth at Work). These are a few notes I took that spoke to me in the moment, but this is not a full representation and absolutely does not do the conference justice!
I’ve been through my fair share of technical interviews. Typically, they’ll ask you to complete a live exercise, provide code samples, or answer mundane questions about a particular language or framework. Generally, those approaches are useless. Even the most talented software engineers do not always remember how to implement hashCode(), the differences between various search/sort algorithms, or the most appropriate data structure to use for a specific context.
In my stint as a software engineering manager, I set out with all the typical “I can do this better” mantras. I won’t ask the stupid technical bits — I’d rather have someone who knows the right questions to ask and how to use Google. I won’t ask for a live coding exercise, since that’s so far from reality and folks are often nervous. I’ll focus more on how they’ve used specific technologies to tackle problems, what they’re proud of, their hobbies, communication skills, blah blah blah.
All that is well and good, but I found it missed critical areas: how well can this candidate critically think about design patterns, component design, the composition of components, governance, and working effectively in a team? I’d argue those skills are the most important to have, but also the hardest to gauge and discover. We tried all sorts of tactics, but never really found the sweet spot.
Continue reading “The Right Way to Run a Technical Interview”
Recently, I briefly went through a period of looking into next step options. I’ve worked remotely for years and have no intentions of ever changing that! We were blessed with an awesome opportunity that popped up, so the search is finally over. But before I completely turn to the next page, I thought I’d throw out some links that were incredibly helpful:
When it comes to interacting with relational databases, citizens of the Java world tend to be in one of two camps. Lately, the rift continues to widen.
Folks miss an important point: ORM was never meant to be used for everything! It is a tool to be used where applicable. Can it be used as a complete abstraction or replacement for everything involving the database, shielding developers from ever having to learn SQL? For the most part, yes. Should it be? Definitely no. It often makes sense to combine ORM with other SQL approaches, marrying the best of both worlds.
Continue reading “Hibernate ORM, jOOQ, HikariCP, Transactions, and Spring: An SQL / CQRS Tutorial”
If you have experience with Apache Camel, this one might sound a little obvious. But, it has recently come up a few times, so it’s worth mentioning. As an example, say you have a route that iterates over paged data and does something with it, and you therefore need to keep track of the pagination. You might use something like the following:
Continue reading “Apache Camel Processors Should NEVER Be Stateful”
Imagine you manage a team of corporate event planners, responsible for overseeing each event and ensuring every single detail is arranged and executed. Your team consists of 8 individuals. The scale of each event is sufficiently large, requiring you to task each individual. If any of them fail, the event will be unsatisfactory (at best) or completely unsafe (at worst).
If you have a team developing OSGi applications for Apache Karaf, Vagrant provides an easy way to ensure everyone is testing local deployments in a consistent context. Vagrant is a little like Docker, using a layered approach to build up virtual environments. In this case, we create an Ubuntu “box”, running on a VirtualBox VM, and automatically set it up with everything necessary for Karaf testing. Continue reading “Apache Karaf on Vagrant (example Vagrantfile)”