Ddd

I’ve been wanting to share this experience for a while, but it took me a while to come up with a story and example I could use in a blog post. I help out during the weekends in a small family run magic shop. I’m the third generation working in the shop. My great-grandfather always hoped that his only son would follow in his footsteps as a carpenter. But at only eighteen years old, my grandfather said goodbye to the chisels and sawdust, and set out for the big city to chase his dream of becoming a world class magician. The first few years were tough, he was no Houdini. He would (hardly) get by performing at kid birthday parties, weddings and store openings. That’s how he met my late grandmother. She worked as a shop girl in one of the first malls that were built in the city, and happened to show up each time my grandfather performed in one of the stores. After getting married, having a baby (my dad) and saving every dime they earned, my grandfather was able to rent a hole in the wall and open up his own tiny magic shop - in that same mall. Once my dad finished school, he worked as a middle school teacher for a few years, giving up on that job to join his father in the family business. He loves to tell you how he can now still teach children, without the chore of grading their homework. I’ve been running around and helping out in the store since I could barely walk. I guess you can say that magic runs in our blood. ...

Seems that it’s impossible to beat the Gaussian curve of blogging frequency. On the other hand, I spent quite some of my mental blogging budget on an interview with InfoQ. I’m a bit bummed out that it’s such a large wall of text. When submitting the answers, I highlighted some snippets which should make for easier scanning. Too bad the formatting was lost when publishing it. I included some highlights below. ...

User notifications are a feature that came as an afterthought, but turned out to be rather easy to implement - without touching (read: breaking) existing functionality - thanks to having an immutable event log. In the domain I’m working in at the moment, we will often give users incentives to return to the website, or to extend their stay on the website. These incentives were only communicated by email at first, and this is a decent medium when you want users to return to the website. However, when you want to extend their stay on the website, you want to avoid users switching contexts between your website and their mail client. But also, as soon as they return to your website, you want to show them a crisp overview of all relevant calls to action. Having most calls to action map to a specific page, the list of notifications can serve as a one-click starting point, lowering the hurdle to browse to a relevant page. ...

In my recent talk on Evil by Design, I showed how I’ve been visualizing event streams as a means to get a better grip on how aggregates behave in production. The talk’s scope kept me from showing the code that goes together with the examples shown. Consider this post as an addendum to that talk. First off, we need a few types: a string that identifies a stream, an event containing a timestamp and its name. A stream which is a composition of an identifier and a sequence of events. We also need a function that’s able to read a stream based on its identifier. ...

Third time attending Build Stuff, first time doing a talk. I’m happy that it’s out of the way and can now just enjoy the conference, but I’m even more excited that it was well-received! The talk should have been recorded, but you can already find the abstract and slides below. Last year I ventured into the domain of (online) gambling. Given that the industry has been around since forever, I expected most problems to be of the technical kind. As it turned out, the struggle with technology was only part of a bigger problem; to move forward we needed to fully grasp the industry and its consumers. Events started out as a way to dismantle a legacy system, but quickly proved to be an effective tool to gain a deeper understanding of our domain. Visualising event streams, we discovered patterns that helped us identify what drives different types of users. Having a better understanding of what customers are looking for, we dove into existing literature to learn which techniques and models casinos use to cater for each type of user. We learned how to program chance while staying true to the Random Number God. Even when variance is brutal, casinos have enough data and tools to steer clear from the pain barrier. All of this entails interesting problems and software, but isn’t my code damaging society? Or is gambling just another human trait? ...

Casinos invest a lot of energy selling the dream. One way to do this is by showing off people winning big in your casino. Everyone has seen those corny pictures of people holding human-sized cheques right? It’s a solid tactic, since empirical evidence shows that after a store has sold a large-prize winning lottery ticket, the ticket sales increase from 12 to 38% over the following weeks. If we look at slot machine play, what exactly defines a big win? The first stab we took at this was quite sloppy. We took an arbitrary number and said wins bigger than 500 euro are impressive. This was quick and easy to implement, but when we observed the results we noticed that when you have players playing at high stakes, a win of 500 euro really isn’t that impressive, and we would see the exceptional high roller often dominate the results. ...

In a previous series of posts, I went over the models used by casinos to spin a wheel (spinning, manipulating the odds, clustering and near misses). I did not yet expand on the basic mathematical models that ensure a casino makes money. Let’s pretend we are spinning the wheel again. The wheel has 5 pockets, and just one of those is the winning one. Given we will be using an unmodified wheel, you win 1 out of 5 spins. Each bet costs you 1 euro. Looking at the true odds (1/5), the casino should pay out 4 euro for you to break even. ...

In our system a backoffice user can issue a promotion code for users to redeem. Redeeming a promotion code, a user receives a discount on his next purchase or a free gift. A promotion code is only active for a limited amount of time, can only be redeemed a limited amount of times and can only be redeemed once per user. public bool TryRedeem(UserId userId) { if (HasAlreadyBeenRedeemedByUser(userId)) return false; if (NoLongerActive()) return false; if (Depleted()) return false; Apply(new PromotionCodeRedeemed(userId.Value)); return true; } In code these requirements translated into a promotion code aggregate which would guard three invariants. ...

Since online gambling has been regulated in Belgium, basically each eligible license holder has complemented their land based operations with an online counterpart. Being such a small country, everyone wants to secure their market share as soon as possible. The big players have been pouring tons of money in to marketing and advertising, it’s everywhere: radio, television, (online) newspapers, bus stops, billboards, sport events, airplane vouchers - you name it. While regulations for land based casinos are very strict and almost overprotective, regulations for online play are much more permissive. This makes that online casinos can be rather aggressive acquiring new customers. ...

The previous post showed a simple model casinos use to manipulate the odds. Instead of relying on the physical wheel for randomness, they rely on a virtual list of indexes that maps to the physical wheel. Using that same model, it’s easy to fiddle with the virtual indexes so that they map to misses right next to the winning pocket, creating “near misses”. “Near misses” make players feel less like losing, since you “almost won”. Casinos use this technique to get the next spin out of you. ...