robinhowlett

This looks excellent - i've been looking for a timeline-based, simple-entry tool like this. Well done.

Thanks for the links - agree about the (x,y,text) callout but other metadata like font size can be useful too.

Regexes have limitations but I was able them to leverage them sufficiently for PDFs from a single source.

I parsed over 1 million PDFs that had a fairly complex layout using Apache PDFBox and wrote about it here: https://www.robinhowlett.com/blog/2019/11/29/parsing-structu...

Disclaimer: written by CEO of my company

It's funny how this area seems to attract titles like this. I used the same for my blog post, "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About SSL (but Were Afraid to Ask)"

http://www.robinhowlett.com/blog/2016/01/05/everything-you-e...

Disclaimer: I write blog posts to figure out if I understand something correctly and appreciate any and all feedback, negative or positive.

It's a question I've asked myself too. I've also wondered how often others are being aggressively pursued by former colleagues to join them at another company. I've seen team strongly believe they hire strong candidates only, but rarely seem to pursue these same people after moving to a new company.

This comment resonates more than any other. I absolutely agree with it. A complete demarcation in my life's focus and goals before getting married and, especially, having children.

I got into a similar pickle recently and did some press about it: http://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/getting-from-cease-and-...

I'm also working on a Chrome Extension that modifies the functionality of a website, but this is giving me second thoughts.

Nice looking client. I've been tipping away at a JavaFX application of late. I'm shipping with a JVM and bundling into .app/.exe distributions. Looking forward to seeing what you did to learn from it.

Yes I encountered similar issues but many of them were able to be solved.

With PDFBox I was able to deal with the content at a very low level (on a per-character basis), so that when for instance building a String, I would insert a pipe character when the distance between adjacent characters was greater than the width of the space character and then detect that when translating to a certain field.

See the convertToText() method for an example: https://github.com/robinhowlett/chart-parser/blob/master/src...

and https://github.com/robinhowlett/chart-parser/blob/f8d651e9a1... for when I used this technique

Author here; well, PDFBox is good for simple text stripping. If I wanted to print all the text on the PDF, that would be very straightforward and not much code. However, the PDF chart here is in essence a representation of structured data. I wanted to get the content in that format so that I could both serialize to JSON plus have an SDK to boot.

A web endpoint. So think of an HTTP endpoint where the request body gets turned into the input data and the query parameters become available to be used/mapped anywhere in the pipeline. It makes the integrations pretty dynamic.

[0] Kind of. It's a filter, so "false" means "do not advance". We have different Snaps for If-Else (the Snap would have 2+ outputs and you would route to a respective "branch" of the pipeline)

[1] They denote different categories - parallelogram = READ (i.e fetch data from somewhere), square = Transform (modify existing data)

[2] For Each Issue - for each object in the specific, targeted array of incoming JSON object... (basically split the array chosen)

[3] Correct

[4] You can adjust the rotation of each output, so it could snake around. You also can drag the output of one to the input of another that are not side-by-side and it will mark them as connected, so you have layout in any way. Finally, you could split up into separate pipelines and use another Snap to tie them together.

I don't think you are being harsh - I'm not sure there is any way for a visual programming language to be both powerful enough to permit massive customizations and concise enough to be immediately readable. Some level of interpretation has to be done.

I work for SnapLogic (an enterprise visual integration product) - the "free canvas" works great for us with live preview of results/data; here's an example linking a third-party code review tool's webhooks with JIRA: https://i.imgur.com/gNr1gGD.png

All of our integrations can be converted into a API with a click of a button too.

Well done

I used to use UpShot, a OS X plugin that saved by screenshots to my Public Dropbox folder and copied the public link to the clipboard. It was super useful for referencing images in code reviews, wikis etc.

Anyone recommend a better alternative?

Nice. I recently got very familiar with PDFBox and parsing complex layouts - it is a great library.

Integration platform as a service (iPaas) that can work with streaming, batch, and Big Data using a drag-n-drop UI e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfEuG7Dg_O8

Check out my company, SnapLogic: https://www.snaplogic.com/

Parsing horse racing PDFs with Java.

+1 for another useful tool. My favorite for these use cases is http://mockbin.com. You can also define the response if so needed.

This is an area I work in [1]. Folks understandably mention IFTTT/Zapier a lot but the big players in the enterprise integration space are SnapLogic, Mulesoft, Informatica, Dell Boomi, with maybe a couple of others making noise also.

App integration is only one part of it (and arguably the easiest part) - there's also Data integration, IoT/event streaming pipelines, and integrations suitable for Big Data processing.

Enterprises naturally have quite specific demands on things like security, governance, encryption, support etc. that move things away from the free integration products, and also

I haven't seen much of Flow so far but will pay attention to it. The UX appears quite simple - it is difficult to build an effective integration product that is friendly to non-technical folks, while still being powerful enough for orchestrating complex pipelines by skilled data architects and developers.

It's a crowded space however, so getting traction may be challenging. I'm interested to seeing how they go forward with this.

[1] http://www.snaplogic.com

In 2014, Isis, the mobile-payment service built by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, changed its name to Softcard for obvious reasons.

Does anyone work in a remote team with an always-on video conference?

I really, really prefer being able to shout out a quick question but the friction costs (and fear of interrupting deep thought) about calling someone, sometimes even a Slack message, prevents communication at times.

The times where I've been pairing or on a long call "in the background" have been great I thought. Any downsides for those who do this regularly?

I haven't read this (long) article in its entirety yet but I did make this presentation[1] last year to satisfy my interest in the space and help me understand where it stood.

I borrowed a lot from Adam Krejcik's tweets, who is quoted in this article. See slide 21 for notes about player attrition

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/robinhowlett/daily-fantasy-sports-...

Like it - though the FILE_SHARED example doesn't appear to work.

Parsing horse racing PDF charts into JSON and then visualizing the race as a motion chart using d3.js

I recently joined a competitor (SnapLogic). It's a lot nicer IMHO - HTML5 drag-n-drop interface, unified platform for big data, API integrations, IoT etc., and supports executing integrations either in the cloud or on-premise.

Bitten by this recently - well written.

Yes, yes: http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

Her first name is pronounced "No-reen" for those wondering.

Are you describing CQRS? http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CQRS.html

Yes agree, but Akamai can also transcode and repackage to HLS. We've used this at SportsLabs[1] to stream tens of thousands of sports events.

[1] http://sportslabs.com/