I came across an issue with AngularJS in one of the projects I worked on which I thought was worth signalling. It all stems back from the usage of $index inside a ng-repeat group — in the context of using a filter in ng-repeat, and as such it took us a bit to identify the […]
Posts Categorized: Tech
Engineering Marketing
First of all please notice the title of this post: Engineering Marketing — and not Marketing Engineering! (I do work currently in Ads Engineering in Netflix, which deals as you would expect with Marketing Engineering, in other words engineering solutions to support our digital marketing efforts.) Point being that this post is about marketing engineering […]
The Power of Technical Jargon
I recently had the chance to reflect over how important jargon can be when building a product and I thought I’d share my thoughts and findings here. A bit of history: a while back (quite a while back now) I helped a small startup (let’s call them Green Media) which operated in digital marketing and online […]
Breaking into open source
I read recently Shubheksha‘s blog post “A Beginner’s Very Bumpy Journey Through The World of Open Source” which describes her initial journeys into the open source world and reminded me a bit of some of my initial adventures into open source. (I even wrote a blog post ages ago — my goodness, literally ages ago […]
Reverse Engineering Las Vegas :-)
I just got back home from a weekend in Las Vegas, woohoo!!! (OK, that’s not entirely correct, I got back home a couple of nights ago but it took me so long to recover 🙂 Which is why only now have the time to share some thoughts on this trip… Anyway, I bet a lot. And […]
Java, Map and Optional
I do like the Optional class in Java — it is a long awaited elegant replacement for returning null whenever something isn’t there then relying on if( x != null ) checks or using ?: in the format (x == null) ? “foo” : “bar”. It works great also with the new Java stream classes […]
Thoughts on Programming and Its Challenges
At the end of another tough week in Netflix I look back at what I have achieved and what has been challenging in achieving it. I do wonder what I do looks like from the outside and I can’t really see how someone would make sense of my job. I sit in front of 3 (sometimes more!) […]
Gotcha When Building Gradle Plugins on Top of docker-java-plugin
If you use gradle and docker you must have come across the gradle-docker-plugin. And if you started using it a lot you probably found out that more often than not your builds start using the same boilerplate code to prepare your microservices containers. And if you end up in that situation best thing to avoid boilerplate rubbish […]
Disable PMD Plugin to Run for Test Sources
I use PMD in my Gradle builds quite a bit. (Maybe a bit more nowadays that the FindBugs peeps seem to be struggling with that project — see this email from Andrey on this: https://mailman.cs.umd.edu/pipermail/findbugs-discuss/2016-November/004321.html). The issue I had with it is that there is no way to quickly turn off their checks for the src/test/… […]
PMD Rules
If you have used such plugins in your project as FindBugs, Checkstyle etc then you quite likely have heard of PMD too. (I have used these tools initially with Apache Maven and nowadays use them via Gradle in my builds, but there’s lots of support for others tools, Ant included.) The trouble with PMD as […]










