Blog

Recently I was debugging an application where it was taking a really long time to load spring application context. The application server folks were complaining because they were getting paged and it was really making development painful as integration test were exceeding over 3+ minutes. We are dealing with lots of legacy xml configuration based modules and are moving to java config but it feels like a big pipe dream unless we were able to write a semi-automated script to convert applicationContext.xml to java config files.

There are still a few browsers that don't support SVGs so it is good practice to provide a proper fall back option. One technique to do this is to utilize the img tag onerror event. Lets say that your site uses all SVGs and if someone makes a request to your site with a browser that doesn't support SVGs this event is fired when an error occurs loading the image. Your HTML might look something like this:

If your web infrastructure doesn't handle gziping by default you can enable it by configuring a servlet filter within your java based web application. If you aren't familiar, gzip is a file format used to compress data written to the response and decompress data read from the request. This is a quick hit in reducing the size of the request over the wire whether it is html, JavaScript, css or REST assets especially if teams are focusing on "performance as a feature".

The weekend of February 26th I had an opportunity to participate in DSMHack which is a Des Moines Iowa based event bringing 80 technical folks to help 10 non-profit organizations. A group of 8 of us from Principal partnered with Teens Against Human Trafficking, an organization founded in Iowa, whose mission is to raise awareness about human trafficking through the powerful voice of young people. Not only did this mission inspire us but the founder Lexi who is just 18 years old was awesome to work with with an amazing vision.

A few weeks ago I presented at the Des Moines JavaScript user group (dsmjs) on jekyllrb, a static site generator. You can check out my presentation slides.