Author Archives: Dave Copeland
Dave’s Talk at ScalaDays 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.
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Tie Tuesday – more fun that it sounds
The developers have an informal “Tie Tuesday” each work. It’s exactly what it sounds like. And, since you asked, yes, it is more fun to wear a tie when you don’t have to. Not everyone does it every week, but this week, we had the best participation yet:
Riley Dawg participates in tie tuesday
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When adding more threads makes it all slower
I’ve been working on a new feature that requires analysis of each individual’s entire energy-use history. In other words, I have a process that will touch every single bit of data in our database. This should be a rare thing, so if it takes a while, it’s not that big of a deal. My initial [...]
A year-long analysis of snack consumption
Consistently, month after month, the chips that get left in the giant ‘box-o-free-snacks’ are:
Nacho Cheese Doritos.
Honorable Mentions: Fritos and Cool Ranch Doritos.… Continue reading ...
Measuring our awesomeness iteration by iteration
Like a lot of startups (and big companies!) we use iterative development: we break up our work into "stories" describing features and implement as many as we can in one month. We then repeat that until we conquer the world. But, if we can do more, or work more efficiently with each iteration, our goal of world domination will approach that much quicker :)
The easiest way to do that is to look at the bugs our QA staff find in the product updates. Although we have a lot of automated tests, we still need some eyes on the applications to check for things like text overruns of our printed reports, or JavaScript weirdness in some less-than-well-behaved) browsers.
Boxed primitives and ==