I read recently an article on DZone titled “Defensive Programming: Why You Shouldn’t Check Input Parameters for Validity” (by the way, you can find the article here: https://dzone.com/articles/defensive-programming-via-validating-decorators) and it made me think — and write this post π For those of you who don’t have the patience to read the full article, the author […]
Posts Categorized: Tech
Gradle — Customize Startup Scripts for Java Applications
OK, so you use Gradle to build your Java projects. And if you use the application plugin in Gradle then you get also the startup script generation so you can ship that straight into your prod servers. Thing is, the application plugin generates a “standard” script — which does include the classpath and a whole […]
JaCoCo / Gradle — Excluding Source Files and Classes
I have switched recently from Cobertura to JaCoCo so I started becoming more familiar with this tool. (And since you asked, one of the main reasons for the switch is that Cobertura is absolutely terrible when it comes to Java lambdas and pollutes the output with a lot of warning and messages about malformed Java […]
Automating Twitter OAuth Tasks with node.js
At Netflix, we made a name for ourselves for being a Java shop. A quick look at our Netflix OSS page on Github reveals a whole suite of projects all Java-based. However, apart from the Java projects that are going on in Netflix β and the JVM-based projects (we DO Groovy and Scala too!) β […]
Start Your Own Open Source Project using SourceForge
It’s interesting what one can find when cleaning up an old laptop before dumping it π Old photos that I’ve long forgotten of (some embarrassing ones too, omg the haircuts I supported throughout the time! :D), snippets of code back from the day when technology X was just coming out of its stables and I […]
Jenkins CI Trick to Prevent Task from Triggering Itself on SCM Commit
I’ve come across this recently working on a project in Netflix and thought worth sharing. The project I was dealing with packages some JavaScript code which, before deployment, needed to be minified. We have set up our Jenkins task such that it polls Git for changes in the master branch and when the changes are […]
Convenience Factory Methods for Collections in Java 9
Looking the other day through the JDK Enhancements Proposals (aka “JEP“) I came across JEP-269: “Convenience Factory Methods for Collections”. Oh hello, where have you been all these previous JDK releases? π It seems finally the Java world has woken up to what other JVM languages (and not only!) have been offering for a while: […]
Remember the Time
Does anyone remember a company called Borland? Or am I showing my age too much? π Spotted the other day, at a team event with my Netflix colleagues, in Mountain View.
Odd Behaviour in Groovy when Comparing Maps
I came across this the other day and I ended up spending quite some time on it pulling my hair and I still couldn’t explain it in the end so I thoughtΒ I’d post here to see if anyone can shed some light into it. In brief, it’s about Groovy’s (otherwise awesome!) feature of comparing […]
Cobertura Issue with Ignoring Annotated Methods
I’ve decided to plug in Cobertura in (some) of my projects to have an idea on the unit test/code coverage going on. I use Gradle, so I started looking at the Cobertura Gradle plugin. It turns out it’s pretty good — and offers a lot of the functionality that I needed. However, I came across […]










