Erwaman's Personal Journal - October 2013

I just started at LinkedIn on the Hadoop infrastructure team. We do a lot of stuff involving Hadoop, which involves lots of Java jar libraries. A term I hear frequently around the office is "fat jar", usually in a phrase like "don't fat jar hadoop-core into your hadoop job". Intuitively, I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but I decided to search online just to be sure. So I typed "what does fat jar mean" into Google.

It's funny what happens when you're in a rush. You don't read things carefully. I expect a clear answer to just jump out at me. So even though there were results such as this ("deploying with a FatJar (meaning all classfiles AND all library jar file contents compressed into a single jar)") and this ("an uber-jar is a "super jar", one that packages both your package and its dependencies into one single JAR file."), since I didn't find any results where someone asked my exact question, I decided to ask it myself. This was my first Stack Overflow question: What does it mean to "fat-jar" something into a jar file?

Almost immediately, my question was down-voted. (Since I only had a reputation of 1 when I received the down vote, and you can't have less than 1 point, I didn't lose any reputation.) The first response I got was: "Have you tried googling for the expression a bit?". Of course I had, but since the answer didn't jump out immediately, I thought by asking the question explicitly on Stack Overflow, I could create a search result that would help others in the future. I thought that by asking, I was helping to organize the world's knowledge.

A few minutes later, the person who had commented "Have you tried googling" actually answered my question. To be honest, I didn't think the answer was that clear, but he did provide some additional information and color. It was also the only response that was long enough to remain as an answer. When I went to answer and link What is an uber jar? to my question, I found out that answers less than a certain length are considered trivial and automatically converted to comments.

Anyways, I marked the one answer to my question as "accepted", earning me my first two reputation points (on top of the 1 point minimum everyone starts with). Later, somebody upvoted my question back to 0, and I got +5 reputation for that, so now my reputation is 8.

A couple hours later, someone replied to the "Have you tried googling" comment with links to Embrace the non-Googlers and How should we deal with Google questions?. I agree with the top-voted answer to the latter question: "Either answer nothing, or give a correct answer. But please do not answer 'Tried www.google.com?'. I hate such useless posts."

A couple hours after this, my question was closed as off-topic. The reason cited was: "Questions concerning problems with code you've written must describe the specific problem - and include valid code to reproduce it - in the question itself. See SSCCE.org for guidance." True, my problem was not about code specifically, nor did I include any code, but I thought my question was pretty clear, narrow, and objectively answerable, similar to other what-is-this, what-is-that questions.

All in all, asking my first question on Stack Overflow was quite an experience, and I learned a lot about how Stack Overflow works in the process. I look forward to asking more questions and contributing answers in the future. I also look forward to reaching 15 reputation, so I can start upvoting questions and answers.

Here are my favorite browser features (apart from tabs, which everyone takes for granted these days):

• Keyword search - I spend a lot of time looking stuff up on Wikipedia and Google Maps, among other search engines. Rather than using a search box like Firefox and IE have, I just have keywords - usually single-letter words - for all of my frequently used search engines:
  
  FF and Chrome both support this, but IE doesn't (this is a deal breaker).
• Ctrl+Shift+Tab - Too often, I close a tab and then realize a split second later that I still needed it. That's where Undo Close Tab comes in handy. This is supported by all 3 major browsers.
• Ctrl+click on the back button - Sometimes you click a link and then you want to compare the new page with the previous page, or open the previous page in a new tab to remind yourself to go back to it. This is when Ctrl-clicking the back button comes in handy. Works in FF and Chrome but not in IE.
• Ctrl+Enter while doing a find - In Chrome, when you press Ctrl+F and then press Enter to cycle through the results, if the currently focused result is a link, you can press Ctrl+Enter to follow the link. Currently, this only works in Chrome. In FF, Ctrl+Enter toggles the "Highlight all" option on and off. In IE, it just moves to the next match. IE and FF's finds support case-sensitive search, while Chrome's find doesn't (which surprises me).
• Private/Incognito Mode - Good when using other people's computers for checking personal accounts. I like how in Chrome and IE, when InPrivate/Incognito Mode is started, the non-private mode windows still remain open. I dislike how FF suspends (and temporarily closes) all open windows when you start Private Browsing.

What about you? What browser features do you like?