Great tip from a colleague for setting up your git repo for git flow.

Please stop using XmlGregorianCalendar as the default type to model xs:date or xs:dateTime in a JAXB class. If you’re on Java 8 or later then you should be using the new java.time classes like LocalDate, LocalDateTime, and ZonedDateTime.

I’ve been trying out a new approach for helping students debug their Abstract Syntax Trees in the Compiler Design and Implementation class where I’m a TA. The compiler they’re building is for a subset of C89 and the first two assignments are flex and bison which culminate in an AST for their compiler to perform the compilation.

Jetty is a great way of testing your web-apps that are destined for a simple web server as opposed to a J2EE server.

A colleague recently schooled me on performance testing with some links to posts and videos about Gil Tene’s “coordinated omission” problem. I started incorporating the HdrHistogram library into my analysis of performance results and while there are some helpful intros into how to use this library and visualize the results, I didn’t find a detailed explanation into what the raw data was so I’ve added a note here.