At our developer meeting this week, we had a “jumble sale” theme, where various of us talked briefly about interesting technologies or things we’d been working with recently.
Inigo talked about Runnertrack and Heroku. Runnertrack is an app that he’s written that tracks runners running marathons, such as the London Marathon. Heroku is a very convenient hosting option for applications that are run for brief periods with low traffic like this. It’s easy to set up, and applications can be launched based on pushing to a Git repo.
Dan discussed Project Euler – he’s been working through the (currently 546) Euler problems and has just completed the first 100 problems. The early ones are all easy – the later ones are more challenging. The maths is not hugely complicated. You can get statistics for how many have been completed, and in what languages. Dan is using Scala. It’s a fun thing to do if you like maths and programming.
Chris talked about Serverless Cloud Computing. We’re using Amazon AWS for managing our servers – but that still means that there’s a server somewhere that needs to be managed, and have security updates applied, and apps installed, and so on. However, if you’re using one of their more specific servers like Route 53, or the Simple Queue Service, it’s just a service. API Gateway pro. Amazon Lambda is a mechanism for running code. A Serverless app has a single-page webapp hosted as HTML in S3, and then it triggers code running on Lambda, using data from Dynamo. The major disadvantage is that it’s entirely tied in to Amazon.
Simon talked about BioJS. It has a good set of visualizations, such as tree stuctures, heatmaps of interactions, graph plots, and so on. Some of these are very life science specific, but some are more widely applicable. The BioJS group is also trying to promote good practice in writing biological code – such as version control, common structure, and having demonstrations. Because of this, the BioJS site is essentially a list of references to other GitHub repos.
Nikolay talked about parsing Word documents. One of our clients has supplied us with documents without any real structure, because they’ve been converted from PDF. We’ve written a set of macros to add appropriate structure and reformat those documents, using Word search and replace. Word search and replace is surprisingly powerful – it can match and replace formatting and styles. Annoyingly, there are two forms of search-and-replace available in Word.
Rhys talked about mocking in Specs2 tests for Scala – and capturing how many times a given call has been made and what it is. There is a way of doing this easily – using the “capture” method. This allows you to capture the calls made to the mock, and then you can retrieve the actual values from the captor.
Loic talked about units, and using strong typing in Scala to attach units to your numeric quantities. There is a Squants library that defines a number of standard units, and the type system can then apply dimensional analysis to check that you are performing legal operations on them – not adding a distance to a time, for example.