I recently had the chance to reflect over how important jargon can be when building a product and I thought I’d share my thoughts and findings here. A bit of history: a while back (quite a while back now) I helped a small startup (let’s call them Green Media) which operated in digital marketing and online […]
I read recently Shubheksha‘s blog post “A Beginner’s Very Bumpy Journey Through The World of Open Source” which describes her initial journeys into the open source world and reminded me a bit of some of my initial adventures into open source. (I even wrote a blog post ages ago — my goodness, literally ages ago […]
I do like the Optional class in Java — it is a long awaited elegant replacement for returning null whenever something isn’t there then relying on if( x != null ) checks or using ?: in the format (x == null) ? “foo” : “bar”. It works great also with the new Java stream classes […]
I use PMD in my Gradle builds quite a bit. (Maybe a bit more nowadays that the FindBugs peeps seem to be struggling with that project — see this email from Andrey on this: https://mailman.cs.umd.edu/pipermail/findbugs-discuss/2016-November/004321.html). The issue I had with it is that there is no way to quickly turn off their checks for the src/test/… […]
If you have used such plugins in your project as FindBugs, Checkstyle etc then you quite likely have heard of PMD too. (I have used these tools initially with Apache Maven and nowadays use them via Gradle in my builds, but there’s lots of support for others tools, Ant included.) The trouble with PMD as […]
As a developer, chances are every time you hear recursion mentioned you probably also hear of Fibonacci’s number. And in the same breath you probably hear also of stack overflow 🙂 Because — as you get to learn quickly — if you decide to implement Fibonacci’s number via a recursive function, you end up abusing […]
With the introduction of lambdas in Java (not so) recently, some argue that Groovy lost some of its thunder, as closures are now first class citizens in the JDK. However, as I’m about to show, while lambda’s pushed the Java language a great deal forward, Groovy still makes a lot of things incredibly easy (and […]
I’m going to spread some lovin’ today for the widely-used yet less appreciated feature in Groovy which allows creating a Java bean and setting its properties in one line. Especially when dealing with unit tests this saves me a great deal of time and frustration. If you ever worked with “pure” (??) Java beans, then […]
This is something that every now and then I have to do: check whether either one or all elements of a collection meet a certain criteria. The standard code initially in Java involved a for loop and iterating through the collection explicitly and checking the condition at each step. Then Apache Commons came on with their […]
Nicolas Fränkel published a blog entry recently talking about “Type-safe annotations” in Java — which trigger my thoughts on the same matter, and voila, there’s this post as a result of it. This is in fact my 2 cents on the matter — and as such I’d recommend you read Nicolas’ point of view too […]
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