Monthly Archives: May 2010

Boxed primitives and ==

By Dave Copeland in Best Practice, Code, Culture | May 27, 2010
One part of programming culture at OPOWER is to program defensively, providing useful information when contracts are violated. What does this have to do with boxed primitives? Getting an assertion message of “Person 1001′s customer id 109032 didn’t match the passed-in customer’s id of 109032″ seemed logically impossible, but was somehow true. But first, let’s [...]

The Standing Desk

By Tom Vaughan in Development, Tools | May 24, 2010
Dave, My OPOWER colleague switched from a normal office desk & chair situation to a standing desk more than a year ago and ever since, I’d been considering doing the same.  For my entire programming career, I’ve had terrible posture in my chair and tended to do “the maxell pose” where my wrists are resting [...]

Cinco de Failure

By Tom Vaughan in Culture | May 5, 2010
If you’ve ever seen Yoni or Jeff K, you would know that I have absolutely no chance of competing in a facial-hair competition with them on raw natural talent.  Thus, for the 2010 Cinco de Mustache event, I felt compelled to compete on ingenuity and engineering. To the disgust of myself and my wife, I [...]

Dave’s Talk at ScalaDays 2010

By Dave Copeland in Code, Tools | May 3, 2010
OPOWER graciously sent me to Switzerland this year for ScalaDays 2010. I was lucky enough to be asked to present on “Sneaking Scala into the Enterprise”. OPOWER sponsored the videography. My talk, on starting to use Scala in your organization (based on my experience at OPOWER), is linked below; all the talks are online here. [...]