Colin Webb

I write software for a living, and most of my side projects are software based too. I view side projects as a tool for learning. Learning by doing.

Elm is a functional programming language aimed at the browser. It aims to replace all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. It borrows a lot from Haskell, and promises that if your Elm code compiles, it will run without exceptions.

Using custom types in Play Framework’s routes file is a major win, and is not something obviously supported.

Cassandra Time-To-Live (TTL) is decribed in the Datastax documentation. This blog post briefly explores it to demonstrate that TTL is set per column, and not per row.

Scala has nice abstractions for asynchronous code. However, writing tests for that code sometimes results in an ugly, unreadable mess. Fortunately, ScalaTest has built-in support for testing Futures, in addition to utilities for other types of asynchronous testing, such as polling and test-probes.

'Agile' may now be an overloaded term abused by all kinds of people, but the original manifesto is actually still quite relevant. The second point is:

Working software over comprehensive documentation

This is useful to embrace in many circumstances, and can be expanded to:

You should intially favour building software over documenting it. Comprehensive documentation can come later.

As the end of the year approaches, Twitter has a hash-tag named #Code2014 that encourages people to tweet which programming languages they've been using over the last 12 months.

In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an algebraic structure with a single associative binary operation and an identity element. Monoids are studied in semigroup theory as they are semigroups with identity.

Wikipedia has the above definition of a Monoid. This blog post will desconstruct that definition to simply describe what a monoid is, and why you would want to use one.

My previous blog post talked about building Aggregation Services using Play-JSON. In it, I mentioned that Aggregation Services using JavaScript might be quite nice. As JSON is native to JavaScript, you might expect manipulating JSON in JavaScript to be incredibly simple. And you would be correct!

Aggregation services (sometimes known as Composite or Hydration services) are useful when working in SOA. In SOA, services are responsible for discrete objects and collections, yet still often need to reference other object or collections controlled by another service. This is done via referencing Ids. In order to display something useful to the user it is necessary to lookup data from multiple sources and aggregate them together.