Paul Gross

We had a conversation at work the other day about Dropwizard vs Spark for Java services. One of my coworkers liked the simplicity of Spark, especially when building example applications. I pointed out

Many of our new apps at Braintree use environment variables for configuration. This is in line with Twelve-Factor principles and makes it easier to run the same artifact in multiple environments. In our

My wife and I have been using You Need a Budget (YNAB) for a few months now. Overall, we like it, but the lack of reporting is a big missing feature. It's hard

I just finished migrating this blog from WordPress to Ghost. Why WordPress served me well for a long time, but it led to a setup that was hard to maintain. In order to

This is my last post in WordPress. I’m migrating this blog to Ghost. All of the existing posts (with their current URLs) should keep working, and hopefully the RSS feed migrates as

One great new feature of the upcoming Java 9 release is JShell, a Java REPL. Java is long overdue for an official REPL, so I was eager to try it out. I found

We recently switched a collection of Java applications and libraries (in a monorepo) from Gradle to Bazel at Braintree. Overall, the transition went well and we are much happier with Bazel than Gradle.

I’ve been doing some Java lately, and the new functional additions in Java 8 are interesting. Java still has a long way to go, but they made functional programming in Java easier.

I recently gave a presentation at Rubyconf 2014 titled: Testing Isn’t Enough: Fighting Bugs with Hacks. The video and slides are now online.

This post is cross-posted at Safe Operations For High Volume PostgreSQL. We use PostgreSQL extensively at Braintree, and it backs many of our highly available services (including our main payments API). We are

I had the opportunity this year to present my talk on “High Availability at Braintree” at four conferences. Here is the roundup: RubyConf Australia (February): Slides and Video Surge (September): Slides and Video

We primarily use Mingle for project management at Braintree. Personally, I find that the Mingle card wall wastes too much space. Each card is the same size, so short cards are filled with

This post is cross-posted at Development Hacks to Prevent Mistakes. Bugs are an inevitable part of software development. We do our best to write higher quality software, but we never fully escape releasing

Update (3/31/13): The video of the talk is online: High Availability at Braintree The slides from my RubyConf Australia talk are now online: High Availability at Braintree. The slides were generated

This post is cross-posted at Scaling PostgreSQL at Braintree: Four Years of Evolution. We love PostgreSQL at Braintree. Although we use many different data stores (such as Riak, MongoDB, Redis, and Memcached), most

There are two main types of unit tests: state based and interaction based. State based tests rely on the verification of state. These tests typically perform some operation and then check the state

If you’re like me, you’ve switched all of your websites to paperless statements. No more bank, credit card, or utility statements arrive in the mail. But you would still like to

The slides from my Intuit CTOF (“Create The Offering Forum”) talk are now online: How Braintree Builds a Platform for Developers. The slides were generated using showoff.

This post is cross-posted at Data Migrations for NoSQL with Curator. The NoSQL movement has brought us a wave of new data stores beyond the traditional relational databases. These data stores come with

This post is cross-posted at http://www.braintreepayments.com/devblog/untangle-domain-and-persistence-logic-with-curator. The problem Ruby on Rails is a great web framework, and we use it extensively at Braintree to build web apps. One

I have wanted a Home theater PC for awhile to play movies, music, Hulu, and more through my TV. I thought briefly about buying a prebuilt device (like a Roku), but I decided

We have a suite of ruby applications at Braintree. There are many times when we need to run more than one of these apps at the same time. For example, we might need

I just released version 1.0 of speclj-growl. This is a plugin for the speclj test framework for clojure which adds Growl popups for each spec run. For those unfamiliar with Growl, it

Leiningen uses Maven to make dependency management of clojure projects much simpler. However, if you need to depend on jars that are not in a Maven repository, things get a little more complicated.

Before I dive into my main arguments, I do believe feature branches make sense for open source development. Generally, developers will work on branches dedicated to given features. This way, when they are