I write Markdown using Vim and the vim-pencil plugin and one of the things that particularly bothered me was that, by default, iTerm2 and the solarized colour scheme did not support italic text. I finally sat down this evening and got this working. Really, I just found and watched Greg Hurrel’s YouTube video explaining the whole thing. To enable italics requires updating the terminfo database. Terminfo enables programs to use the terminal in a device-independent manner. For us, this means that it allows applications to lookup the correct escape codes for displaying italics. If the terminfo database has the correct escape codes present in the database, italics are displayed. If not? No italics. ...

I’ve been asked recently, what’s the difference between Swagger and Thrift (or gRPC)? Although they look similar, they solve fundamentally different problems. Let’s look at the differences. Swagger At the most basic level, Swagger is a REST API specification language. The great part is that there is an entire ecosystem of tools built around this specification language to support API design, client and server code generation, and interactive documentation. Key Features REST + JSON API framework. JSON requests and responses. Code generation. Documentation generation. Thrift Thrift is a software framework for supporting RPC. An interface definition language is used to describe your system in terms of data types and interfaces, the Thrift compiler generates client and server code that match your definition, and the Thrift library handles serialization and transport. ...

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. Confucius We all want to have a perfect product, a perfect system, and a perfect development story. Unfortunately, reality is … reality. And it’s not perfect. One of the biggest struggles of engineering well is understanding the constant push and pull among the forces that govern the “rest of the business”, and governing your technological and development choices accordingly. Do not strive for perfection. Strive to be good enough. ...

Here it is. My version of the S3 static site. This one is publishable through CloudFormation and uses CodeCommit and CodeBuild to regenerate and publish the site with every push to the host Git repository. Any change to the CodeCommit Git repository automatically triggers a build through CodeCommit. This build runs the Hugo static site generator on your repo and syncs the results to an S3 bucket configured for serving a static site. ...

Having created a custom Boomi connector, the next step is packaging it as a Jar file for testing and release. This requires setting some configuration files that allow the Atom process to load and run your files. Connector configuration file The first configuration we need to set is the META-INF/connector-config.xml file. This file tells the Atom process which class implements your custom connector. This file must have a root XML element named GenericConnector and specify the class name of your connector — which must be the class that extends the BaseConnector class. ...

This article will show you how to create a custom connector for reading data from Dell Boomi. The connector will read the list of GitHub follower’s from the public GitHub API. This should provide an overview of how to write your own custom connector for a unique I/O source. Prerequisites To follow along, you need to have a valid Boomi licence (or free trial) to setup the Boomi Connector SDK. The SDK is written in Java so Java development experience is assumed. ...

Business intelligence and analytics use cases involve complex queries on potentially very large databases. To minimize query response times, query optimization is critical. One approach to optimizing query response times is to precompute relevant values ahead of time, and to use those precomputed results to answer queries. Unfortunately, it is not always feasible to precompute every potential value that is required to answer arbitrary queries. This paper describes a framework and presents algorithms that pick a good subset of queries to precompute to optimize response time. ...

This tutorial describes how to setup a test integration running Dell Boomi. For those not familiar, Boomi is an integration platform as a service that implements many of the integration patterns described in the book Enterprise Integration Patterns. It is a commercial alternative to the Apache Camel open source integration framework. Boomi Overview Boomi allows developers to run an integration Process, which is composed of an input stage, followed by data transformations and any business logic, followed by one or more output stages where the data is written out to a final destination. ...

In a REST application, it’s often the case that several clients might interact with a single resource, each holding a copy of the resources state. At any point in time, these client’s understanding of resource state may differ from each other or from the server. Without some way of realigning resource state, changes requested by a client based on an out-of-date understanding of resource may have undesired effects, from repeating computationally expensive requests to overwriting and losing another client’s changes. ...

Amazon’s API Gateway provides the ability to transform a response from an endpoint into a different format for return to the client. One thing I wished to accomplish with this was to return a value to the client, only if it was set in the response. Essentially, I wanted to check for the existence of a JSON property in the response, and react accordingly. The solution was not obvious to me, and this post serves to record that solution for posterity. ...