Unit testing Spark Dataframe transformations
Parts of Spark jobs that do pure-functional transformations on dataframes or RDDs – independent of I/O – are ideal candidates for unit testing.
React, ES6 and JSX readability
Previously I complained about React and JSX readability. I was unhappy with something like this:
Good-enough secret message encoder on JSFiddle
One of the activities at my daughter’s 9th birthday party was decoding secret messages (e.g., “be sure to drink your Ovaltine”) using this decoder ring my wife found on Pinterest.
Rant - Java 8 streams are too little, too late
I was looking at some code the other day to convert a comma-delimited string like "1,2,3,4" into a list of integers.
ASP.NET Core with MVC, React and Webpack -- from the command line
.NET Core along with ASP.NET Core, looks like a promising alternative to build ASP.NET web applications, without a dependency on Windows and Visual Studio. This squarely addresses the biggest downsides of ASP.NET – namely, that it only runs on Windows, and you can’t just fire up an application from a command line like you can with Node/Ruby/etc.
Capital Bikeshare app with React and Webpack
I put together this app to try out a few things together:
Query cache without L2 cache
(I’m writing about NHibernate, but this applies equally to JPA in the Java universe. I’m not sure about Entity Framework.)
Microservice first?
One argument I’ve heard for building microservices from the beginning is that, teams often lack discipline to enforce modularity and separation of concerns. A monolith usually turns into a “big ball of mud,” which is a problem. Starting with microservices forces teams to think about their module boundaries up front.
Anonymous types, dynamic keyword and other reasons I like C#
A few years back I wrote about how I was starting to like C# better than Java.
Screaming Architecture translated to practice
I like Uncle Bob’s post on Screaming Architecture.
React.js and Components vs. Templates
“React is all about modular, composable components,” according to the tutorial. Riot.js emulates the React philosophy that “templates separate technologies, not concerns,” so they “focus on reusable components instead of templates.” As far as I can tell, Angular 2.0 embraces components as well.
DC may not be the next Silicon Valley, but not because of college recruiting
(As usual, all opinions are my own.)
React.js, JSX and readability
React.js is the new hotness in front-end JS frameworks, although I am having a hard time getting excited about it. I’m reacting (pun intended) mostly to readability concerns with JSX. I also have issues about slicing everything up into granular components, but that’s a topic for another day.
Stupid riot.js tricks
I made a simple Riot.js application to try it out. My demo is as simple as it gets: it lets you add and remove items from a list, with a link to display an item from the list selected at random.
Node.js with SQL Server
Yes, you can use SQL Server with Node.js. I added a Gist to show how it could work. I didn’t get to connection pooling or transactions, just enough to get a general feel.