smallwig

Personal ramblings of Kevin Bourrillion, senior software engineer at Google, Inc.

No, my opinions as expressed in this blog are not those of my employer. They're mine alone. That's why they're called "my opinions." Helloooo.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Oh dear. I just discovered that some places still link my name to this site. Eep! A better link would probably be my Google Profile , now.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Guava release 05!

Guava release 05! Hello guavateers, I'm happy to (finally) inform you that Guava release 05 was quietly posted two weeks ago! It is al...

Monday, March 1, 2010

The little optimization that couldn't

Let's say you represent two groups of people. If I collect one penny from each member of Group A, then, from the unbounded kindness of m...

Monday, April 6, 2009

Anyone still out there?

Wow, I can't believe it's already been almost a year since I posted anything meaningful on this blog. Blogging is a total ON/OFF sw...

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

So good I had to come out of blogging hiatus just to share it with you: "Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surger...

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Google Collections presentation

If you'd like to know more about the Google Collections Library, here's a video you can watch: It continues here . Or if you're ...

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

I'm curious: what do you use to parse command-line options in your Java programs? You know, -r, -w, -rwl, --use-flibbert, --foobar=12 an...

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

small favor

Hey, everyone? Like, the next time you're making some clever analogy about something you don't like, involving the concept of ...

Monday, June 16, 2008

Common Java unchecked exception types

I've noticed a lot of confusion about what type of unchecked exception is the right one to throw under various circumstances. Here'...

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

JavaOne approacheth

Just got my sessions all scheduled. As usual, I chose them more for the speakers than for the topics; there are certain individuals who I ju...

I'm a twit

For those who care about such things, I'm on twitter now.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Interesting Stuff I Read

I've added a link to my Google Reader shared items in my sidebar. You can view that, or subscribe to its feed, or whatever! (You don...

Thursday, April 24, 2008

I get to break awesome news

I asked Josh if I could have the pleasure of breaking this news on my li'l blog here, and unbelievably, he actually said "sure....

Pure functions

To its detriment and yours, the Java language makes no distinction between a pure function , and any plain old subroutine. Even in the core ...

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

fun with IdentityHashMap

What does this program print? (Eliding the generics so you can read it.) public static void main(String[] args) { Map m = new IdentityHash...

Monday, April 21, 2008

" "

Who among my readers believes that he/she has a firm grasp on the meaning of the term "whitespace" as it applies to modern Java de...

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The real difference between List<Object> and List, illuminated at last

Suppose you're a store clerk, and a customer asks you, "what kinds of credit cards do you accept?" The difference between List...

The smallwig theory of optimization

There are three kinds of optimization. Optimization by using a more sensible overall approach. Optimization by making the code less weird. ...

Friday, January 25, 2008

Now with "customizable sodomy!"

Holy shit, I want the version of Mass Effect that this guy played! Mine is apparently defective. A damn good game though... but I think the...

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Can you watch this without smiling? If so... I don't know. You might be a replicant or something.

Why does Set.contains() take an Object, not an E?

Virtually everyone learning Java generics is initially puzzled by this. Why should code like the following compile? Set<Long> set...

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Occam's Coder

When deciding between two or more choices for a style rule in your team's programming style guide, and all of these lead to code that is...

Friday, November 9, 2007

What Google Java engineers do while... waiting... for IntelliJ to unhose itself...

This discussion happened on our internal Java mailing list. Dan: "What libraries do people use for generating PDFs from java?" Tim...

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Minor API fixes for JDK 7

Josh, Doug and I are proposing a handful of minor API additions to the Java Class Libraries (lang, util, math and reflect) for JDK 7. The v...

Saturday, November 3, 2007

pseudohumor

if (isBloggingInPseudocode() && intendedEffect() == Effect.HUMOR) { try { beFunny(); // this line unreachable } catc...

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Understanding CLS

This post is about all of us helping each other to understand CLS. CLS is an acronym for "Class Loader Stuff." Man, I just really...

Value objects WTF!!?!!2!

You might recall that here at the smallwig we recently, geologically speaking, discussed the interesting and important topic of how to model...

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

We're a spotlight feature on JavaLobby today!

Monday, October 22, 2007

Collections update: I've integrated more stuff out to subversion (including a big ol' rewrite of the Preconditions class) and I'...

Friday, October 19, 2007

I got a kick out of this observation from Jesse : Here's my two problems with using it [the assert keyword] for business logic: it can ...

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Boy, I sure am getting in some trouble for leaving that teaser post on value objects and never coming back to it! That should teach me a le...

Friday, October 12, 2007

Of course, everyone keeps asking me how much I decided to pay for In Rainbows . They ask me since, well, I love Radiohead enough that, from ...

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Value objects WTF!!?!!1!

Hmm. I just might try my hand at this "blogging" thing after all. So here's something that has me really mystified about Java...

Coupling

Update: a crack team of Googlers who constitute the most powery of our Guice power users have assembled a few times now to hash out the desi...

Monday, June 11, 2007

So I went to the new Rasputin...

So I went to the new Rasputin that replaced Tower Records at El Camino and San Antonio, because I had to get the new Elliott Smith double al...

Friday, June 8, 2007

There's something fundamentally weird about LinkedHashSet, isn't there? You use it when you want to have a guaranteed order of itera...

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Roger Ebert is so awesome.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

It was easier than I thought

I wanted a way to distribute JUnit tests among multiple threads. I couldn't believe how easy it turned out to be. public class Paralle...

Monday, March 12, 2007

by the way, what does 'extraordinarily typesafe' mean?

I was feeling pretty proud about Guice . It went 1.0 last week and has been making the rounds in the blogosphere the last few days; it seem...

Friday, March 9, 2007

This is a blog.

I might start blogging again. I used to blog a ton back in 2001-2004. But, I had the benefit of a job that thoroughly bored me -- and ther...

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