Use and misuse Actually, the title is a bit too broad. We’ll look at how different number of acks, async and timeouts will affect the reliability of your messages. Abstract / TL;DR Kafka can be used in many ways, and there are also many options that you need to understand and decide upon before you ...

In July 2013 more than 40% of the visits to FINN.no were from a tablet or a phone. Nearly one year later, in April 2014 - the share was 48%. What do you think has happened the last year? In April, Google rolled out their “mobile-friendly update”, which boosts the ranking of sites that are mobile fri...

If you want to travel from Oslo to London, you may end up getting results which include layovers in far-away places. Do you really want to spend a night at the airport in Moscow if you only want to go from Oslo to London? Probably not, but nonetheless, some of the results we receive at the FINN Flig...

In this article we’ll explore how Apache Cassandra, the world’s most popular wide column store and 8th most popular database overall, will only grow as a cornerstone technology in a microservices platform. With a little theory to microservices, to some examples of microservices and underlying requir...

In the previous article we introduced our own introduction into the world of Big Data, and explored what it meant for FINN. Here we’ll go into the technical depth about the implementation of our Big Data needs. rehashing the previous article FINN is a busy site, the busiest in Norway, and we display...

In our continuing quest to break up our old monolith and create a more flexible and scalable architecture, we have realized that we need to look at some new tools and methods. One of the more promising approaches was Domain Driven Design, a term coined by Eric Evans in his Big Blue Book Quite a few ...

As a die-hard java-developer for several years I was quite annoyed by the fact that Java as a language lagged several years behind C#. (E.g. Java got lambdas last year, 6 years after C#, so standards are nice for compatibility, but tends to be slow to evolve.) Polyfill Now, as a frontend-developer a...

Pondering on the right lambda for the job With Java 8 comes a whole new set of language features. It even challenges the imperative coding-style of the Java programmer. Java is a core language in Finn.no. More and more of our java-modules are being built with Java 8, adopting new features of the lan...

After working several years with (successfully) breaking up the legacy monolith, called iAD, Finn.no wanted to add structure to this process, and make sure that all 20 development teams work towards the same target. The target is a microservices architecture with small-ish autonomous services, ownin...

Last year we decided to move our developer blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. One of the main reasons were the constant security vulnerabilities of Wordpress. We were hosting Wordpress on our own hardware. We pleased our operations team when they could shut down the service. Github provides hosting for ...

The data in this post was gathered by Hans-Erik Hallheim, Henrik Faller and Lene Kallum. The three most popular ads in 2014 were Audi A6, Walkman wanted badly and Skis with crap boots, used twice We had over 7,4 million sofa related searches in 2014 and around 7000 unique permutations containing sof...

At FINN oppdrag, a year ago we came to realize that our front-end code, written in JSP/jQuery, had become so large and complex that it affected our ability to produce features. We spent more time making sure the DOM manipulations were correct and did not break, than actually creating value for our u...

We were invited by Nova for their first Nova Hackathon. A Hackathon is period of time where computer programmers collaborate intensively on a given task or multiple tasks. For the Nova Hackathon Challenge Finn was invited to make a task for the students along with 2 other companies. The challenge th...

One of the ways of getting inspired and educated about technology here at FINN is through our “Tech-dag”. This year we have a packed program which consists of workshops, some talks and a bunch of lightning talks. Last time we posted about techday was in 2012. Presentations Throughout the day we had ...

Last week was Europe’s ApacheCon, held in Budapest. A refreshingly “laid-back and no-nonsense” conference free from the douchebaggery that comes from big sponsors and marketing. This year it was held in the awesome 5-star Corinthia Hotel, and consisted of a welcoming and cheerful vibe, a place for a...

It all started with a simple tweet: Er det noen som har noe norsk statistikk på bruk av e-post (gmail vs. outlook vs. online vs. yahoo osv)? F.eks @labs_finn_no eller @NRKbeta?— Håvard Bergersen (@haavardb) March 7, 2014 “Does anyone have any Norwegian statistics on the use of email (Gmail vs. Outlo...

Workshop with blindfolded lunch in cooperation with The Norwegian Association of the Blind and Partially Sighted (NABP) At FINN a grassroots group of developers and interaction designers launched an initiative to bring up awareness of accessibility. The law of accessibility was introduced July 1st 2...

To make it easy for all our codebases, to automatically have all logging abstractions pointing towards log4j2 along with logstash configured, we have bundled together the dependencies via one library. These dependencies look like: <!-- core libraries --> org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-api:2.0.2 org....

Now that log4j2 is the predominant logging framework in use at FINN.no why not share the good news with the world and try to provide a summary over the introduction of this exciting new technology into our platform. let's just one logging framework In beginning of September 2013 it became the respon...

What? Why is FINN.no donating to scale NPM? I thought you guys were a pure Java shop? It is true, we used to be a pure Java-shop. However over the past three years we have adopted new technologies to solve specific problems. We have used Ruby and Cucumber for some time to make a platform for continu...

There is a Norwegian start-up called AppearIn which enables anyone to do online video conferencing with only a web browser. They utilize WebRTC to empower users to create rooms where they can hang out, do meetings, etc. We had the pleasure of having Ingrid form Appear In over for a visit and she sug...

The idea of package management is to correctly operate and bundle together various components in any system. The practice of package management is a consequence from the design and evolution of each component’s API. Package management is tedious but necessary. It can also help to address the ‘fear o...

Make sure to distinguish between these two. They are not the same thing, and it’s a lot quicker to just Dark Launch. In addition Dark Launching promotes incremental development, continuous delivery, and modular design. Feature Toggles need not, and can possibly be counter-productive. Dark Launching ...

Most of FINN.no is built with Java and we’ve been a Java shop for 6-7 years. With the professionalization of front-end development we saw that the tools available in the Java Web Development ecosystem was preventing us from delivering rapidly and with high quality. The trend was that the tools we us...

“There is no way to do CVS right.” - Linus FINN is migrating from subversion to the ever trendy git. We’ve waited years for it to happen, here we’ll try to highlight why and how we are doing it. Working together There’s no doubt that git gives us a cleaner way of working on top of each other. Wherev...

At FINN.no being a developer fixing bugs in a library is a breeze. Getting every user of your library to use the fix, however, is a different story. How to know who to notify? I mean, I know my library’s dependencies, but who “out there” has dependency to the component where I just fixed a bug? I wi...

A summary of this year’s Strataconf & Hadoop World. A fascinating and inspiring conference with use-cases on both sides of an ethical divide – proof that the technologies coming are game-changers in both our industry and in society. Along with some intimidating use-cases i’ve never seen such recruit...

Here at FINN we use mostly Java for our day-to-day work, but we do have some applications and modules written in other languages. We currently have code in Java, Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C and Scala, supporting things as diverse as testing frameworks and iOS-apps. Recently there has been some dis...

This is the first article describing FINN.no’s coming of age with Big Data. It’ll cover the challenges arising the need for it, the challenges in accomplishing new goals with new tools, and the challenges that remain ahead. Big Data is for many just another vague and hyped up trend getting more than...

A story of getting the View layer up and running quickly in Spring… Since the original article, parts of the code has been accepted upstream, now available as part of the Tiles-3 release, so the article has been updated — it's all even simpler! Based upon the Composite pattern and Convention over Co...