HockeyPlayer

Emporia Energy is a Colorado company that sells smart EV chargers and home energy monitors. We are selling about ten thousand devices a month through Amazon and Shopify and we need better tools for sales tracking, managing inventory across warehouses and forecasting demand (since physical product takes months to manufacture and ship).

We are debating build vs buy. On the buy side we are considering BrightPearl and MRPeasy. I’m reluctant to distract the software team with building internal tools but we have had success building internal tools at our previous companies.

I’d appreciate any comments or lessons learned from similar companies selling physical products.

A friend wants to break into coding and has asked my advice. He has an offer from Revature, which he describes as:

"They train their new associates for 10 to 12 weeks and then try to place them at different companies. Since the training is free and they also provide corporate housing, they require new associates to sign an agreement for a two year employment term. The first year pay is around 50k and the second year around 65k. The training is in Arlington Texas and after the training they can send me anywhere in the US to work depending on their clients needs."

My initial thoughts are that he would be better suited with an online school as being forced to travel for 2 years for that low of pay isn't a good deal. But I'm not up to speed on the subject and would appreciate advice.

We are building a Java GUI to talk to a Java server. The GUI mostly displays information streaming from the server and occasionally gives the server commands. We control the code on both sides. Full deployment is about 10 clients, each talking to 1-3 servers that are in a different state.

I’m having trouble finding information about modern Java client-server best practices.

I’d like to hear architectural or library recommendations that address:

- Pushing just the data that changed seems nicer than polling the servers every second

- Several of the clients are requesting the same information from the same server; minimizing the load on that server would be nice.

- Serialization of objects. Protocol Buffers vs native Java serialization?

- Recovery when the network hiccups