Technical Rex

Vertafore Quiz Bowl 2014

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Erik Gillespie

We just finished up a release at Vertafore and before kicking off the next release I wanted to do something fun with the dev teams so I picked up some lockout buzzers and organized a quiz bowl. NERD ALERT: I wrote a web app for score keeping and open sourced it too!

30 Days of Answers on Stack Overflow

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Erik Gillespie

For years I could summarize my usage of Stack Overflow as "open a browser tab, search the web for my problem, click on the Stack Overflow result, follow the answer's advice, close the browser tab." I decided to change this by spending 30 days answering questions on Stack Overflow. It was educational to say the least. Here are some thoughts about my experience.

RestEasy and Spring 4 - The Break Up

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Erik Gillespie

I have created enough projects from scratch that use Spring and RestEasy that I can crank out all of the code and XML by hand. That's what I thought anyway, until I decided to try out Spring 4 in one of these new projects.

Performance Playground - Jackson vs. Protocol Buffers

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Erik Gillespie

I've been benchmarking the Google Protocol Buffers and Jackson JSON serialization frameworks to compare data size and serialization/deserialization performance. The results are interesting, and in an effort to share more, the source code has been made available too!

Open for Business!

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Erik Gillespie

Technical Rex is undergoing a transformation to better focus on building great software. Part of that change involves sharing more about how things get done!