111–120 of 194 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep - stalling out big time. Good chance to test your error handling in a real world scenario!
Have just had to add timeouts to a few requests to the twitter API. Was completely hanging a whole site. Learn't something though, to never trust an API to respond in a reasonable amount of time!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Incredibly useful" would imply that if you told me about Twitter, I wouldn't believe you. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it's not that hard to believe that someone invented IRC over HTTP and gave it a silly name.
Christ, enough with the pedantry. I'm getting sick of all the pedants on HN critiquing idioms and common phrases. Did you understand what the GP meant? Yes. Did you need to point out to the world your complete mastery of the English language? No. The GP's point was that Twitter is useful, despite it's relatively low score on "innovative new technology" scale.
Always fun when you're developing against an API, and then have to perform a frantic investigation to work out if your latest code change broke everything ... or it's just the API endpoint itself.
Unit test ( as already mentioned) and build up static json/xml/whatever files to run your code against so that you can integration test your stuff without integration testing the 3rd party stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unit test ( as already mentioned) and build up static json/xml/whatever files to run your code against so that you can integration test your stuff without integration testing the 3rd party stuff.
And hope your static files still match the API behavior when your done...
Obviously, this does you no good when something like an API service goes down, but that's issue is irrelevant to the question that was posed. Having some static file to test against whether it is accurate or not will instantly tell you whether it is your code or the third party that is breaking.
I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly. I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Just like the recen…
"I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly." It is likely that what you mean by "properly" is impossible. At large enough scales, what you end up with is a Gaussian distribution of errors in accordance with the Central Limit Theorem... except that there's a Black Swan spike in the low-probability, high-consequence events, and you basically can't…
It not only occurs in the technology industry, but also even in things like financial risk analysis. For example, people could mitigate the risk of a bond defaulting by buying a credit default swap. However, most people failed to assess the risk of their counter-party going belly up, like AIG or Lehman. This failure in risk assessment is in large part why the financial crisis was so widespread.
I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly. I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Just like the recen…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/09/10/its_bofh_disaster_re...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Incredibly useful" would imply that if you told me about Twitter, I wouldn't believe you. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it's not that hard to believe that someone invented IRC over HTTP and gave it a silly name.
Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the value of Twitter until they used it. In that sense, we literally did not believe how useful Twitter was. Also, Twitter is almost nothing like IRC in any respect other than being an electronic communication medium.
I'm still skeptical and I have used it.
One great thing about this for me: it exposed a bug in my app which relied on twitter being up.