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Fun puzzle from Cryptography Research

December 22, 2010

We got a package from our friends at Cryptography Research today. It was a puzzle inside a puzzle, worthy of being a significant plot device in a Dan Brown novel. It took us several minutes to open, then the real fun began in cracking the cryptography. Date: Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 2:08 PMSubject: Re:… Read more

dev2ops Video Q&A: Continuous Deployment requires great testing

November 17, 2010

Thanks to Damon Edwards for the great questions during our interview at Yahoo! Large Scale Production Engineering Meetup.

If you ever write a varags method…

November 08, 2010

In some specific cases, methods with a variable argument list might greatly improve the usability of an API. However, it is very easy to overuse or misuse this language feature, leading to cumbersome APIs. Varags methods shine when the programmer knows how many arguments must be passed to a specific invocation of the method when… Read more

Practical Scala/Java interoperability by small examples

September 14, 2010

If you try to combine Java code with Scala in your application, everything seems to go fine until you bump into big differences between Java collections and Scala collections. A Scala Traversable is not Java Iterable and vice versa; maps are different, etc. So, in practice, you have to do conversion. Fortunately, there are pretty… Read more

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

May 31, 2010

Behavioral science and specifically motivational science is fascinating. When you wake up, what drives you? Dan Pink, in his recent book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, identifies three principal factors: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Check out the video below to get an excerpt.

jQuery.data(): underappreciated

May 28, 2010

One of the most underappreciated jQuery methods has to be .data(). It allows you to associate arbitrary named values with DOM elements. Usage is simple:   $(“body”).data(“x”, 1); $(“body”).data(“y”, someObject);   You can store any data types and expect the same back.   As a web developer, I’m sure some of you have assigned arbitrary… Read more