Brian Parsons

Nice sleuthing and humorously written alert / background info on SSL connections in Android. SSL is one of the least problematic security / privacy issues with a smartphone, but I found it entertaining as I have gone through a round of hardening servers and apps and in the process have learned much about ciphers and handshake protocols.

Link: Why Android SSL was downgraded from AES256-SHA to RC4-MD5 in late 2010

Very interesting approach to increasing the quality and speed of your coding as well as learning new languages.

Link: Using Katas To Improve

I have had the pleasure of working with AlchemyAPI and it is for real. I found it to be excellent at entity and sentiment extraction. For many applications if you are looking for certain things (like brands) - you can have it leverage your own dictionary as one of the sources. Truly brilliant and for real. It's great to see those guys getting some due finally.

Link: AlchemyAPI says it’s delivering Google-level deep learning as a service

Great info on how to optimize mobile apps to be easy on data and battery.

Link: If You're Programming a Cell Phone Like a Server You're Doing it Wrong

One of the problems that MongoDB users face is the limitation on writes. I ran into this problem trying to scale MongoDB for a digital media company a few years ago. Mailbox/Dropbox has one approach to getting over this hurdle and even wrote a custom tool to help. Well worth a read if you are using MongoDB for anything.

Link: Dropbox Tech Blog » Blog Archive » Scaling MongoDB at Mailbox