Dec 3 2014

Quick introduction to Swift

Introduction of Swift programming language during WWDC 2014 was big news in developers’ world. The community warmly welcomed the language created by Apple and many developers started learning and using it immediately. This article explains what Swift is and its basic concepts. If you are an iOS (or OS X) developer it means that you probably already know all the things described below, but if you haven’t started your iOS development adventure yet (but you want to), this article could be a good introduction for you.


Dec 2 2014

We were on re:inventure (AWS conference summary)

Two weeks ago we attended AWS re:invent conference in Las Vegas. Our company was represented by Wojciech Lesicki (Product Owner of our cloud infrastructure), Sebastian Pietrowski (Head of Architecture and Operations) and Mateusz Gajewski (Solutions Architect). This post summarises new product announcements made during the keynotes, our impressions on breakout sessions, bootcamps and conference itself.


Nov 26 2014

Testing RESTful services and their clients

REST (Representational State Transfer) has become very popular over the course of the past few years. It has happened so not only because of growing popularity of lightweight Web frameworks (like Angular.js) but also due to the new Microservice Architecture hype (thank you Netlifx). Frameworks like Spring add new REST-related functionalities with each new release and more and more companies decide to give them a try… But how do you test them - REST services and their clients?




Nov 5 2014

Hadoop World 2014 New York from a developer’s point of view

This year’s edition of Strata Hadoop World held in New York was humongous, 16 workshops, over 20 keynotes, over 130 talks and most importantly over 5000 attendees! This massive crowd wouldn’t fit in Hilton hotel where the previous edition was held. That is why organizers had to move the conference to Javits Conference Center - an enormous building in which Big Data believers occupied just one sector. The fact that the European edition of Hadoop Summit experienced exactly the same transition (the third edition is going to be held in a bigger location in Brussels) gives pleasant assurance that Big Data technologies are still a hot topic and that Big Data Community grows at a stable pace.




Oct 15 2014

JDD.14 dev contest solutions

JDD conference is behind us. We had a great time doing a github dev contest (Chief Troublemaker Officer) for conference attendees. Some guys complained that the contest was too hard, good to hear! It was out intention not to make it too trivial.



Oct 8 2014

The Memory Game

CPU time and memory are the two primary resources every performance-sensitive application needs to use wisely. Java is now the language of choice for many such systems. While most developers have at least basic understanding of computational complexity, I believe that few, especially among those who primarily use Virtual-Machine based languages such as Java, understand well how their applications manage memory. This is not only a very interesting topic in itself, but can also help in improving performance of Java applications or in understanding better the behavior of common Java-based databases such as Apache Cassandra.


Oct 1 2014

Java Testing Toolbox

Introduction This article is addressed mainly to people who are not very experienced in the area of unit / integration testing although basic knowledge of JUnit is required. I am going to provide you with a quick recap of the most commonly used Java testing tools, starting with JUnit (together with three nice complementary libraries: JUnitParams, catch-exception) and Mockito. Then I will show you how to perform assertions in a much nicer and cleaner way using AssertJ so that you never have to use Hamcrest again.


Sep 24 2014

Allegro OpenSource: axion-release-plugin

In the good old days of Maven releasing projects was straightforward. Everyone knew and used maven-release-plugin, a plugin that behind simple facade did huge amounts of work. In Gradle times things started to get complicated. In exchange for greater flexibility we gave up good old, maybe a bit rusty tools that were part of our developer kits for years. Now we try to find new ones. Most of teams in Allegro have decided to migrate their projects from Maven to Gradle and we, too, are searching for perfect tools to do our job (and builds).


Sep 17 2014

Cassandra Modeling Kata

What is Apache Cassandra? Apache Cassandra is an open source, distributed, high performance, cloud-friendly NoSQL database offering high availability with its masterless and no single-point-of-failure architecture. If you are new to Apache Cassandra and NoSQL, I highly recommend reading these great introductions:


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