The sample code associated with this post can be found on Github.
In Java, the input and output stream abstraction can be used with file systems or across networks. While a lot of these abstractions have been abstracted even further away with modern libraries and tools (via servlets, for example), understanding the basics makes solving things like performance issues a little easier to wrap your head around.
The Everything Store, by Brad Stone, is a critical and beginning-to-end (well, middle, since they still labor on) look at how Amazon came to be. Unlike many books about technology founders, Stone does not descend into “hero worship,” and instead tries to stick to cold, hard facts.
While we would all like to be up to date, sometimes legacy systems handcuff us into using an older version of software. Java is no exception, and in some cases we have to resort to using, say, Java 8, instead of the latest version with all of the security updates that we need.
In our last post on simulating a cloud environment on your local machine, we saw that we could use virtual box to create a virtual machine that could both talk to your local computer, with its own IP address, and to the internet.
While you can always spin up a Digital Ocean or Linode Virtual Private Server to toy around with, that both costs money (pennies, at most a dollar or two, admittedly) and isn’t an extremely fast feedback loop for server provisioning. What we really want, as developers, is a way to test out an idea, see its feasibility, and preferably tinker with that idea until it’s solid.
The New New Thing, by Michael Lewis, is a pseudo biography of Jim Clark, meant to be introspective of the modern day tech industry. While it was written nearly twenty years ago, much of the culture that was unearthed in the 1990s still remains in Silicon Valley, and the attitude of a man who founded three separate billion dollar companies is something to pay very close attention to.
Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss, is a book about how to negotiate. As opposed to theoreticians in a classroom, Chris Voss spent a great part of his life negotiating in the real world, and with the highest stakes imaginable, as an FBI hostage negotiator.
The topic of this summary in quotes is Skin In the Game. The book’s central argument is that people who don’t participate in both the downside and upside of something don’t know what they are talking about. Simply put, if you haven’t been chastised for failure in the real world and promoted for excellence in that same real world, then you will fail to actually know how the real world works.
The sample code for this post can be found on GitHub.
Parallel Streams are simple to generate in Java. Instead of calling .stream(), you simply call parallelStream(). Here, we’ll take our familiar list of names:
The sample code for this post can be found on GitHub.
While Streams in Java would typically be used on POJO or POJO-like data structures, Java also lets us deal directly with primitive type streams. Thanks to Java’s type erasure, something like Stream would not work, as the type argument must be an Object.
The sample code for this post can be found on GitHub.
Reduction operations are a way to consolidate collections into one simple result.
You can view the sample code associated with this post on GitHub.
One interesting feature of collecting streams using the Collectors.groupingBy(..) method is the ability to manipulate downstream elements. Basically,
this means that, after you group the keys of the map, you can further make changes to the collection that the map is pointing to. By default, it collects to a list.
