Episodes

Episode 23. Who is interrupting me while I sleep in the waiting room? (A talk on wait/notify and interruptedExceptions)

It always starts when you do your first Thread.sleep(). Why do I have to check for InterruptedException? is it serious? why do I have to catch it? We start with answering these questions and step down the rabbit hole to discover the inner workings of Wait/Notify (and what the IllegalMonitorStateException really means). If you ever...

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Episode 24. Usability for Engineers. A simple way to achieve usability for the hardcore engineer

Designers will come to you, and say “Hm, I think your program is not as user-friendly”. And sometimes, when you ask them to elaborate, they seem to follow a hidden and cryptic ritual. They are right, yet, is hard to see how did they come up with those usability suggestion. Alas, behind every usability magician,...

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Episode 25. Reflection and vampire classes, and compiling Java from within Java.

We have heard the word “Reflection” thrown around, what does it mean? it is a new Twilight series? is it about Vampires? In all, we shed sunlight into what reflection is (and more importantly why in the world you want to use it). And also cover a technique to compile and load programs within your...

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Episode 26. I take Exception to that statement! A quick overview of Exception quirkiness

As developers, we have to deal with Exceptions every day (or at least every other day). In this episode we dive a bit on exception (and exception handling), plus we talk about certain behaviors that are not so well-understood (try returning from a finally block, or why exception stack traces sometimes misteriously disappears). A good...

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Episode 27. There’s a Log File in the folder in the middle of the App

(Sing to the children’s song There’s a hole in the middle of the sea) Logging is part of everyday production debugging life. If you ever had to troubleshoot a production application, the you most likely have looked at log files. These log files can either be a salvation, or an inmense source of frustration. In...

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Episode 28. Extra! Extra! JMS Delivering Messages to your App! Extra! Extra!

Episode 28. Extra! Extra! JMS Delivering Messages to your App! Extra! Extra! —- Java Message Service (or JMS for short) is a collection of APIs and implementations that allows you to send “messages” across your applcation. But why is it so popular?, and what exactly is it trying to solve (what is a message anyways)?...

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