Learning - codeboje

And the reason was...

Last Update: 24.04.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

The dev who created the adapter worked also on the other parts of the system before. As I joined the company, he basically handed the whole system over to me over a period of a few months, I think. We even started brainstorming/prototyping a new web service so the core func can be made available as a web service instead of a lib. The lib approach caused a few troubles as there were some external maintained apps and they hesitated to update the core at all - political games.

Can we have too many abstractions in a codebase?

Last Update: 23.04.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

Sounds like a simple question, but is it?

Unit tests with an external DB?

Last Update: 19.04.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

Today I was helping out on a second project from the stone age. It’s at least a decade old and still running and maintained. After checking out, I dared to run a mvn clean install and guess what happened?

Getter and Setter are annoying

Last Update: 17.04.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

As much as I love Java, yeah it is still one of my languages of choice after 2 decades, one thing that feels pretty annoying all the time is adhering to the Java Bean convention and thus providing getter and setter and sometimes a few others. The convention itself makes sense and a lot of the libs in the Java world require it. Yet, it never made it into the compiler and automatically provide it. Kotlin does it, why not Java?

Who's the audience for the docs?

Last Update: 16.04.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

There’s a confluence for the project from stone age I am helping out. Its aim is to provide the documentation for the project. Unfortunately, it does not have a clear focus for whom it is written.
Yep, a documentation has an audience - the stakeholders. Depending on the audience, it contains slightly different information, e.g. third-party devs connecting to the system want to know how to do just that and how they can map their business use cases to the systems API; on the other hand, the internal devs are probably not interested in such details as they care for their business use cases. Same goes when the audience is non-dev too.

Behavior driven development to the rescue?

Last Update: 13.04.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

Sandeep joins the discussion and comes up with a question regarding out-of-date documentation.

What about other docs?

Last Update: 12.04.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

Yesterday’s topic and Alejandro’s reply lead me to another type of documentation. The out-of-code docs. Everything we document about our system which is not in the code or at least close to the code, that can be diagrams, wikis, word docs, whatever.

Am I missing the point?

Last Update: 11.04.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

Yesterday I talked about a case of Javadoc gone wrong. Reader Alejandro wrote in and thinks I am missing the main problem here because it is the code and not the Javadoc. I’d like to discuss that a bit further.