Dragons in the Algorithm
Adventures in Programming
by Michael Chermside

Author: mcherm

Amazon Job offer

An email I received from an Amazon recruiter

Hi Michael,

I recruit for a multitude of software development engineers for Amazon Services which is frequently mentioned by Jeff Bezos as one of our key strategic growth opportunities for the company, which gives you the opportunity to dive deep, think big …

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Posted Sat 05 August 2017 by mcherm in Programming

REST Lambda Versioning

REST Lambda Versioning

So, we want to build a "serverless" application on AWS. We have configured Amazon's "API Gateway" to invoke Lambda functions when accessing certain URLs, and the lambda functions access back-ends like DynamoDB. So far so good. But we don't want to be breaking the application every time …

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Posted Sun 02 July 2017 by mcherm in Programming

Election Guide May 2017

Michael Chermside's Election Guide
to the May 2017 Democratic Primary

As I sometimes do, now that I have finished doing my own research on the candidates and the issues, I will write down my thoughts to endorse the candidates and to share the results of my research. In this case …

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Posted Sun 14 May 2017 by mcherm in Politics

Long-Running Calls

Long-Running Calls

Question: When building RESTful APIs, do you know of any standard patterns for handling long running API calls? Our decision process may take as much as a couple of minutes.

My Answer: I know of four possible approaches:

  1. Long-running API call: In this approach, you just build an …

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Posted Thu 20 April 2017 by mcherm in Programming

COBOL in a Bank

COBOL in a Bank

Question: I hearing about COBOL being used in banks quite often but all my friends who actually working there say Java and Oracle and all related job adverts I have seen so far were Java or C++. Could someone please provide some relevant facts?

My Answer …

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Posted Mon 30 January 2017 by mcherm in Programming