40 blog posts tagged "Programming"

Irina O'Hara is one of our uniquely clever, expert frontend developers. She’s immensely talented and has had a vital impact on our website redesign. When it came time to spotlight her, Irina was a joy to sit down with and get to know a little better. To get to the basics, she writes code and creates awesome websites, and she’s darn good at both. BackgroundIrina was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia. However, she wasn't born a development expert and had other aspirations from the start.

Acacia Warner is easily one of the most multifaceted, well-rounded, and uniquely talented people we have here at Smarty. She is an expert ice skater, violinist, and avid gamer. The most important people in her world are her family members, and she loves that her work at Smarty allows her to go home and actually be home. So what does she do for Smarty? She writes and maintains code for our products, specifically our international suite of products. BackgroundAcacia grew up knowing that she was destined for greatness.

Nerds. While programmers/coders/engineers are extremely clever, we've found they may not fully understand addresses. Sure, they're ready to talk about variables, loops, arrays, the scope of stuff, callbacks, hosting, events, overloading, pattern matching, packets, elements, and more. But if you point out that most house numbering starts at "1" and not "0," their heads may explode. We've worked with quite a few developers and helped them understand the facts around address data, beginning with our own engineers.

We recently brought together Kent Gividen and Bryan Amundson, two of Smarty's brilliant lead developers, to discuss the importance of maintaining a clean address database and how Smarty's innovative tools can make this process easier and more efficient. Question: "How should users prepare their address data before using Smarty's tools?"Kent: "To begin with, if you have a database that you're looking to clean the addresses for, you can dump those addresses into a CSV file. And there are several ways to make that easier to handle and process.

Webinar recap: Ready to take your web forms from "meh" to "wow"?In our recent webinar, we gave tips and tricks and demonstrated live coding magic. The essentials of Smarty's address autocomplete APIJavaScript SDK magic made easyIntegrating Smarty’s Address Autocomplete API using our JavaScript SDK is a breeze. Smarty also has SDKs for . NET, Android, Go, iOS, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Rust, making setting up client credentials, building functions, and handling address lookups look like child’s play.

Meet Dirk, Smarty's very own Swiss Army knife, with a smile. Officially, our Operations Engineer Team Lead, he's our go-to guru for IT, building management, APIs, and more. He’s also known around the office for running the movie script reading group (A group of Smarty workers who spend their lunch reading through well-known and classic movie scripts. ). Picture him as the superhero of systems, ensuring everything runs like a well-oiled machine, providing that smooth, worry-free experience for us here and our customers at Smarty.

In an era dominated by technology, grasping the language of computers – coding – is increasingly essential. The Hour of Code, a global initiative, aligns with this need by making coding more approachable and broadening participation in computer science. This effort parallels Smarty's dedication to technological innovation, striving to simplify and demystify technology for widespread understanding and engagement. The movementThe Hour of Code started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to simplify code and show that anybody can learn the basics.

Today, we spotlight Trey Rutter, our Dev/Ops IT Associate. Trey is the wizard behind the scenes, helping to ensure that our hardware and address data solutions work seamlessly to deliver accurate and reliable information. Let's get to know Trey better. What is the most surprising thing you learned about addresses after joining Smarty?I found it surprising how a ZIP Code can tell us so much. It's more than just 5 digits at the end of your address. When you were in elementary school, what did you want to be when you grew up?As a kid, I had dreams of being an archeologist.

In today's fast-paced tech world, it's essential to gain insights from those who have been in the trenches, building, testing, and creating software that impacts our daily lives. One such individual is Michael Whatcott, a key figure at Smarty. Let's dive into his journey, approach, and the knowledge he's garnered over the years. But that’s just Michael's professional bio. To know who Michael is, we’ve asked for some clarification. Explain it to a 10-year-old: What do you do at Smarty?I work on the tools and systems that make payments, manage subscriptions, and create reports here at Smarty.

Spend enough time as a software developer, and you learn about the existence and pain of technical debt. Understanding, managing, and communicating technical debt is crucial. It allows us to build more maintainable software, improve our productivity, and even boost team morale. We recently hosted a webinar with one of our software development team leads, Kiersten Nelthorpe, and senior software developer Cody Robertson, where they gave valuable insights and strategies to help you deal with technical debt in your work.

In our recent webinar, we brought together two of our software engineer experts, Adam Charlton and Ryan Cox, to demonstrate how to build a working application using ChatGPT to generate most of the code. We know what you're thinking: ChatGPT can't take our jobs; we've tried. This is wonderfully true. ChatGPT can pull together useful bits of information but still needs to be guided and curated by a human, preferably one with subject knowledge. The exact working scenario given by Adam and Ryan was:Write code in Python that takes an address and delivers the ten closest addresses to that address.

We have the luxury at Smarty of working with some incredibly intelligent, kind, friendly, and in many cases, funny individuals. Today we showcase one of those fantastic individuals, Kiersten Nelthorpe. Kiersten is one of our amazingly talented Software Engineers and is the team lead over our Backend Accounts Engineering team. Her accomplishments include building Microsoft API services for enterprise software, developing features for supply chain tools for Vivint, and building backend reporting APIs for Imagine Learning.

We have the luxury at Smarty of working with some fantastically intelligent, kind, friendly, and in many cases, funny individuals. Today we showcase one of those fantastic individuals, Ryan Cox. Ryan has a history of high-quality performance while problem-solving and team-building at large software companies along Silicon Slopes. You want experience? Ryan has experience. We're talking 61 years collectively in Java, Javascript, Typescript, SQL, Angular, AWS, and loads more. As a key developer at each company he's ever worked at, he's keeping the ball rolling by improving the quality of work we do here at Smarty every day.

As you're evaluating potential new business software for your organization, inevitably, someone will bring up the cost. Your purchasing department will likely want to know if moving to the cloud is cheaper than on-premise solutions or vice versa. "Money doesn't grow on trees," they might remind you. To truly compare cloud vs on-premise costs, you should first calculate the total cost of ownership or TCO. The TCO is a financial estimate created to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect lifetime costs of a product or service.

One of the biggest questions in IT infrastructure planning is whether to go with on-premise or cloud software solutions. Each type of software comes with its own pros and cons. To help organizations choose the software that best fits their needs, we created an executive guide that walks you through 6 key factors and breaks down cloud and on-premise strengths and weaknesses for each factor. Download it here to learn about all 6 factors or read on for an overview of on-premise versus cloud software deployment speed and complexity.

There are two types of frequent errors: 401 "Authentication Required" errors, and 402 "Payment Required" errors. If you keep reading, you can learn about both, as well as these other hot topics:Status code 401 - Authentication requiredHow to authenticate API requestsCommon mistakes in client-side requestsCommon mistakes in server-side requestsStatus code 402 - Payment requiredWhen in doubt, contact supportStatus code 401 - Authentication requiredIf you're seeing this error there's a chance that there's an issue with your API key, there's a mistake inside your client-side request, or a mistake in the server-side request.

This is part 1 of a 2 part series. You can read part 2 here. This edition of our blog comes from a special guest writer, Anne Arnold, daughter of Smarty’s own Wes Arnold. Anne will soon graduate high school and as part of her career exploration, she had the opportunity to sit down with the women on Smarty’s software development team. They each shared how they discovered their love for coding, what it’s like to be the only woman in class, and how they’re helping spread the opportunities for prospective women in code like Anne.

Have you ever tried to add a minor feature to your application only to discover that you’ll have to re-write large blocks of code first? Or maybe you’ve spent hours deciphering hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of lines of existing code just to find out a task only required two lines of additional code. If you’re like most developers, you’ve wasted countless, frustrating hours wading through immensely complicated code trying to force it to do things it wasn’t built for. In his presentation, Mike Manwill, Frontend Team Lead here at Smarty, discussed 5 principles to help you create stupidly-simple applications that are maintainable, extendable, and bug-resistant.

Many businesses now collect data online. One could argue that it is nearly impossible to succeed in modern business without some sort of online portal in which there is an exchange of information between the provider and the customer. But how do you ensure that the information being input by the customer (or potential customer) is accurate?While there is no way to ensure that Bobby Duncan doesn’t put “Sammy Sosa” in the name line on a form, there IS a way to ensure that he’s putting in a valid mailing address for you to mail his package to.

TLS (and its predecessor SSL) are cryptographic protocols that provide authentication and data encryption for clients connecting with web servers. As new vulnerabilities are discovered, older cryptographic protocol versions are deprecated to maintain secure environments. On Tuesday, January 21, 2020, Smarty will require clients to use TLSv1. 2 or greater to connect with Smarty APIs without interruption. Clients using TLSv1. 0 or TLSv1. 1 will no longer be able to connect. Please refer to our documentation for more information: https://www.

At approximately 1:30 PM Mountain Time (3:30 PM Eastern) on November 13, 2018, we observed a significant latency spike from our external monitoring tools that we configured to access our load balancing tier of our cloud-based APIs. These monitoring tools provide full, end-to-end testing and are meant to simulate a complete user experience with our application. By design our systems can easily process in excess of 25x the usual amount of traffic we receive. We do this because of our customer usage patterns wherein we may observe a 10-fold increase in traffic within a short period of time—usually a few minutes or even a few seconds.

It's been said that naming is one of the two hardest problems in computer science, along with cache invalidation and 'off-by-one' errors. (See what I did there?) Do you ever find yourself wondering what policies and practices you could adopt to make your life easier when reading code you wrote months ago? Or maybe you're up at night wishing you knew how to write code in such a way as to maximize adoption and convenience for your users? Well, look no further because we've anticipated the need, solved the problem, and now we're sharing our knowledge and wisdom at no charge, all out of the goodness of our hearts in this comprehensive, totally no-nonsense (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) style guide of Go naming conventions.

One topic that seems to come up repeatedly on Stack Overflow or other online forums is the topic of how to go get private dependencies. Specifically, if I have a private Git repository on Github or Bitbucket, how do I bring that code locally via the go get tool such that automated builds can produce a clean, consistent build without interaction from a user? This problem is largely solved for public Github dependencies but continues to be a challenge for private dependencies. To reiterate, if you're only cloning publicly available dependencies, you probably won't be reading this post.

Writing test functions in Go is easy:package stuff import "testing" func TestStuff(t *testing. T) { t. Log("Hello, World!") } Running test functions is also easy:$ go test -v === RUN TestStuff --- PASS: TestStuff (0. 00s) stuff_test. go:6: Hello, World! PASS ok github. com/smartystreets/stuff 0. 006s Preparing shared state for multiple test functions is problematic. The usual recommendation is to use table-drive tests. But this approach has its limits. For us, xUnit is the ideal solution.

For the purpose of this article, consider the following CSV data, slightly modified from the docs for encoding/csv:csvData := strings. NewReader(strings. Join([]string{ first_name,last_name,username, "Rob","Pike",rob, Ken,Thompson,ken, "Robert","Griesemer","gri", }, "\n")) Here's how you read the data, line by line, using the Reader provided in that package:reader := csv. NewReader(csvData) for { record, err := reader. Read() if err == io. EOF { break } if err != nil { // handle the error.

I was recently asked two interesting questions:Why did you move from GoConvey to gunit?Are you recommending folks do the same?These are great questions, and since I'm a co-creator of GoConvey and the principal author of Gunit, I feel responsible for giving a thorough answer. For the impatient, here's the TL;DR:Question 1: Why did you move to gunit?After using GoConvey and feeling consistent friction with that approach, we came up with an alternate approach that was more aligned with what we value in a testing library and which eliminated said friction.

For this installment of the Testing in Go series we'll be talking about a grouping of packages that facilitate general-purpose comparisons in various contexts. Since the most common context is testing it seemed like this series was the right place for the discussion. We generally refer to these comparison functions as assertions (cue ominous background music and spooky sound effects). You may have already read the opinions found on the Golang FAQ related to assertions. "Why does Go not have assertions?"Go doesn't provide assertions.

IntroductionTL;DR: Choose an approach to software testing that helps your organization create the best possible end results. That might mean using and/or creating a few tools and/or libraries along the way. Or, maybe not. What follows is a description of what we do at SmartyStreets, couched as a response to Dan Mullineux's equally valid way of doing things. The costA favourite test helper library, with some simple test assertion functions clearly has some value. . . They [testing libraries] are not so bad, but they come at a cost, defer to avoid them.

I was given the task of setting up a tinc VPN so that we could test performance for comparison against other VPN systems. This task took much longer than it should have. For that reason, I am making this post to help me and others remember how to do it again in the future. Installing tinc is straightforward enough. You can download the latest release and build it or install it from your favorite package manager. The configuration for tinc lives in /etc/tinc. The configuration is what seems to be the hard part of getting tinc to work.

Not every server is made equally. On dedicated servers, the hardware varies widely. On virtual and cloud servers, the resource allocations also vary widely. Some servers are CPU-optimized for maximum computing power. Others focus on having a lot of memory. Some servers are built to have a good balance of all system resources. Hardware aside, we require many differing tasks of our servers. Some applications are processor hungry, some need large amounts of disk space, while others take up a lot of memory.

For this installment of the Testing in Go series I'll share a really nifty way to deal with time in your unit tests. When the behavior you are testing depends on the current time it can be tricky to assert on the results because the current time is a moving target. So, usually we end up resorting to approximations in our assertions that, while functional, always bother me a bit. In some cases, depending directly on the system's current time prevents acceptable test coverage. Consider this trivial example, which defines a calendar service with a method that identifies the current quarter of the current calendar year:File: calendar.

I think it's time for a slight detour. In part 1 we covered the basics of testing in go. In part 2 we covered a few slick ways to execute tests. In part 3 we covered some of our recent endeavors at Smarty to build on the basics. Toward the end of that post, we went into some detail regarding our approach to assertions. The assertions referenced in the GoConvey project are actually their own separate project that are imported into GoConvey. The nice thing about separating the assertions into their own separate project is that they can be used, well, separately.

This post contains additional data referenced from the original sex offender registry post. Records containing the following were excluded from our statistical analysis:[Click to return to article]state=?? and zip=00000 or 11111 street contains "not available" street contains "incarcerated" or "incac" or "incrc" or "incarc" street contains "prison" street contains "absconded" or "absconced" or "absc" street contains "detention" or "det" or "det ctr" or "det center" or "detain" or "dt ctr" street contains "deported" street contains "incarc" street contains "unknown" or "unk" street contains "deceas" or "deseas" street contains "jail" street contains "custody" street contains "immigration" street contains "transien" or "transnt" or "trnsnt" street contains "homeles" or "homles" street contains "inmate" street contains "out of state" street contains "xxx" street contains "failure" or "fail" street contains "fail" street contains "register" street contains "verif" street contains "behav" street contains "institut" or "inst" street is blank street contains "vicinity" street contains "fugit" street contains "no longer" street contains "correctio" or "corr" or "correct" street contains "complia" street contains "reform" street contains "block of" or "blk of" or "blk" state is blank and city contains "unk" street contains "&" street contains "underpass" street contains "offend" street contains "resident" street contains "between" city contains "unknown" AND zip contains "00000" street contains "moved" street contains "nonresident" street contains "unconfirmed" state and zip are same AND city is blank zip contains "jail" city contains "Not available" and zip is unintelligible as a zip street = city street contains " street + city + state has more than two entries street contains "complex" street contains "reincarc" city contains "convict" street contains "usp" street contains "penit" street contains "hosp" street contains "louis" and city is "St.

Here at Smarty, we're mostly programmers and developers. There are a few needles in the haystack here that don't know "Unix" from "eunuchs", which is unfortunate, but we're working on that. And because we're all tech geeks over here, we like to talk about code, and tech, and why all that stuff is important. In that spirit, we decided to talk about code in a way that maybe all of us should have considered a long time ago. Your hidden meaningsLet's start with a scenario. Imagine you go on a museum tour.

ReviewWelcome to part 3 of our "Testing in Go" series. If you're new here, feel free to catch up before reading on. In part 1 of this series I eluded to our perceptions of the standard testing tools provided by the Go tool and the standard library and what was missing for us. We all have different expectations of a testing tool and so it's no wonder that so many have been created. Part 2 of the series focused on how we have made the act of running tests effortless and automatic. IntroductionIn this post and the next few posts I'll focus on our approach to writing actual tests.

Here's part 1 of our "Testing in Go" series. IntroductionThinking about trying Go? You won't regret it! It's great that testing is baked into the "testing" package from the standard library and the corresponding go test command (which has all sorts of useful and interesting flags). We'd like to show you how easy it is to get started using the built-in testing tools and introduce you to some tools we've created. This is the first installment of a series designed to do just that. All you have to do is create a file named like *_test.

Here's part 2 of our "Testing in Go" series. If you're new, feel free to catch up before reading on. BasicsYou've already learned how to execute tests in Go for a single package. $ go test There's a bit more to it, though. You can run any package from anywhere if you provide the import path. For example, this command runs the actual tests for the "testing" package from the standard library:$ go test -v testing If you've already run go get github. com/bradfitz/http2 you can execute those tests from anywhere with this:$ go test -v github.

You asked for it and now you've got it. For packages that pass all tests, coverage reports are generated and made available by clicking the package name, which in that case becomes a link (provided you've cleared your browser's cache!). Right now the coverage command that is run is something like this:$ go test -covermode=set -coverprofile=<package_name>. txt That command generates a plain text profile used in the following command:$ go tool cover -html=<package_name>. txt -o <packge_name>.

One of the great benefits of TDD/BDD is that you usually don't have to spend much, if any time at all in a debugger. To enter a debugger is to admit a loss of control over the system under test. Even so, there are times when you do need to debug something, even if you're maintaining the discipline. Lately, most of my coding is in GoLang. Coming from using an IDE almost exclusively to write Python (using PyCharm) and C# (using VS and ReSharper), and knowing how great the visual debugging tools are it's hard to fathom using a console-based debugger for GoLang code.

It's now been a few months since I decided that the kind of testing tools I wanted for Go programming hadn't yet been created (or I just hadn't found them yet. . . ). So, about 4 months ago I started work on GoConvey and a month later came the first release. The coolest thing about GoConvey (other than the clean DSL, comprehensive set of built-in assertions, and the fact that it integrates fully with go test) is the built-in auto-reloading web UI that reports your test results to your web browser whenever a relevant file is saved (HTML5 notifications included).