Category Archives: best practices

Playing with WebAuthn

Posted on September 8, 2019 by Matthias

On the internet today, our online accounts are exposed to a lot of risks. Leaked passwords from break-ins at major Internet properties or phishing attacks have lead to many account breaches. In order to protect my high-value accounts, I have … Continue reading →

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Retries Can Kill You

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Matthias

In a large-scale distributed system, it’s inevitable that some requests will fail. Even if your collaborating systems work perfectly, sooner or later you will experience temporary network issues and other intermittent errors. That’s why a lot of people try to … Continue reading →

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The Curse of Convenience Methods

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Matthias

In the old days, many Java APIs were fairly low level and pretty generic. You often had to explicitly select a concrete implementation, provide lots of parameters, and generally needed to know how things worked. This has changed in recent years – modern … Continue reading →

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Let’s Use TLS

Posted on January 17, 2016 by Matthias

I have followed the HTTP/2 specification process closely and I like how the new protocol improves web performance and makes old workarounds obsolete. One drawback of deploying HTTP/2 is that most browser vendors only implement it on top of TLS. Since … Continue reading →

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Preventing Cascading Failure

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Matthias

With the advent of reactive programming and frameworks like Netflix’ Hystrix, classic stability patterns like Nygard’s Circuit Breaker Pattern have entered mainstream software development. The circuit breaker is used inside your clients to cut the connection to a collaborating system … Continue reading →

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A Case for Guard Clauses

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Matthias

One of my pet peeves in programming is that few people use guard clauses. A guard clause is an almost trivial concept that greatly improves readability. Inside a method, handle your special cases right away and return immediately.

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Development Done Right

Posted on March 1, 2009 by Matthias

In my projects, I’ve always been the one who took care of infrastructure, standardization and quality assurance from the development perspective. The funny thing is that I’m no admin and no QA guy, so most of it wasn’t even my … Continue reading →

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Saving Session Data in Web Applications

Posted on January 4, 2009 by Matthias

There are many ways to store session data in web applications. They all differ in scalability, failover capabilities, and complexity. I’ll give you a quick rundown on the major themes.

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