Month: May 2015

Time Travel with Reactive Extensions

Niall Connaughton 1 Comment

The Reactive Extensions (Rx) library is one of those tools that opens up your mind to new ways of thinking about your how your data and application work together. In this post I’m going to talk about an easy technique you can use to replay time series data as if it were live.

Replaying time with HistoricalScheduler

Schedulers in Rx are a deep subject, but one of the things schedulers are responsible for is managing how time based operations run. All time based operations in Rx, like Timeout, Delay, etc allow you to provide your own scheduler.

HistoricalScheduler inherits from VirtualTimeScheduler, and that name gives us an idea what we can do with it. VirtualTimeScheduler gives us control of time – at least as far as our code goes. You can’t go back in time and buy stocks to become rich, but you can make your code think it’s doing that.

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Running a Reactive Extensions workshop

Niall Connaughton 6 Comments

I had the opportunity to run a workshop on the Reactive Extensions library with the Sydney Women Who Code group earlier this year. Rx is something I’m passionate about – it really has the power to change the way you approach your data and application design to open up a lot of possibilities.

This post gives some details about the workshop, but is mostly about the process of creating it and some insights into how it went. The workshop and code are on github if you want to check it out.

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