Mashape's Voice

This quick search on Indeed demonstrates the thesis that we have always believed at Mashape. More and more developers are required to grow the API economy. Startups, are starting to hire API evangelists and API engineers. And we should note that those positions would never have existed just 5 years ago.

Indeed.com searches millions of jobs from thousands of job sites, this job trends graph shows relative growth for jobs we find matching "API".

Chatterbox Analytics (a spin-out company from Queen Mary, University of London) are pleased to announce the release of the new sentiment detection API for social texts. This API is designed specifically to classify short social messages, such as tweets, into positive or negative categories. The system uses advanced statistical models trained (they have partnered with Intel to use their super computer for model training) on 68 million tweets, meaning the detection can handle slang, common misspellings, emoticons, hashtags, etc.

The API comes in two flavors, a free version and a paid-for version which gives users more flexibility;  the system currently supports English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

How many Play Framework developers are there in SF? 

We're proud to sponsor the first Play! Framework Hackathon organized by MasterBranch.

Saturday, December 10, 2011 @ 10:00AM - Sunday, December 11, 2011 @ 3:00PM 

San Francisco

Register here and join us in a weekend full of fun, hack a Play Framework app, and drink beer with other geeks.

We are happy to support this growing community!

OH! We're Play! too...and we're hiring: hackers@mashape.com

This is what we learned from our bad experience, with an happy ending.

One day the dev team at Mashape (me and Mike) was relaxing a bit after an hard-core coding session, drinking our daily cup of tea:

We were swaggering on our perfect code base, oh yeah the asyncronous jobs were working so good, the thread pool was implemented perfectly, everything was so good that we started thinking we deserved a trip to Hawaii, where we would have spent all our money, laughing and joking, drinking with cute hawaian girls and.....BOOM, suddleny our Java Unit tests exploded!

Nooooo!!!!!!! We started looking for the damn fuck*n bug that ruined all our dreams, all our glory.. 

Seconds, minutes, hours passed, we were tired, hungry, thirsty..Mike was looking old, I started raving, the tea got cold! We were alone, in the dark, at 2am, with that bug. After a bunch of time, Mike saw the promised land above the breakpoint, while I was seeing pretty ladies coming in the room during our debug session. You know, the promised land it's ok, but when you see nice girls around you while debugging, there's clearly something that's going wrong. We took a deep breathe of fresh air - and some beers.

We looked at each other, perplexed, and in a couple of minutes we were back again on the desk.

After some heavy, boring, challeging, debugging sessions, and some beers, we looked carefully at the locks on shared variables between threads and...we finally found it!

Yeah!

I started crying, Mike saw the Holy Grail above the toolbar, we were so damn excited!!

You know, it was like when you pass that unpassable exam at school, like when you win the lottery, like this:

Both of us..

We fixed the bug and, ta-dam! Our asyncronous jobs were working again.

Conclusion:

Never drink hot tea during a debug session, cause it gets cold after a while.

..with my new 10dbi antenna.