Maarten on IT
Hi, my name is Maarten, an IT specialist and Java Champion from the Netherlands! I’m enthousiastic about open source, Java and software architecture. For a better introduction, you can read more about me.
A few years ago, I’ve started this site as a list of personal notes, interesting findings or whatsoever. Over time, I’m adding content that more looks like a regular blog.
Today, it not only serves myself for things I tend to forget, but I know many more people around the global find new insights here. I hope it will be useful for you, too! Let me know what you think by getting in touch with me. For options, see the right pane.
Recent posts
Below are a few recent posts. Enjoy!Reduce Maven Plugin logging
Sometimes, a Maven plugin logs more then you want it to. I recently had this situation with a plugin that generated source code from specifications. This plugin alone wrote over 22000 lines of output just to inform the user that it did what it had to do. No errors or such, only confirming that it did its job. Such superfluous output makes it hard for developers to focus on actual problems in their build. It’s too easy to think “too long, didn’t read” (TL;DR) and hence miss the important bits. So, it’s time to tame the plugin logging!
— Read more... →Devnexus 2024
This year, I again have the pleasure to join Devnexus and speak there. In this blog, I’ll highlight some of the sessions that I’ve joined.
— Read more... →Measure Your Maven Build
Slow builds are annoying!
There, I’ve said it. And you know it’s true, don’t you? They take valuable time, they are a source of frustration, they extend the feedback cycle, and often they provide the perfect excuse for slacking off.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! Rather than getting another cup of coffee or playing that medieval game of gladiator, what if we would investigate why the build is so slow? If we know the bottlenecks, we can address them. That would shorten the feedback loop, increasing our productivity and our job happiness in one go.
— Read more... →Why Write Boring Apps?
If you’ve built any kind of web-based application in the last decade, chances are you were building a single-page application (SPA). This means you’ve been writing JavaScript or Typescript, had to work with the Node Package Manager or Yarn, needed to understand a framework like Angular, React or Vue and had to learn a new testing framework (or two). And that would have been only the basics. You would probably use other libraries, frameworks and toolkits: for styling the user interface, for doing API calls using REST and/or GraphQL, and for writing reusable components. But we usually take the pain, because the alternative is just… “boring”.
But it is time to reflect on this approach. It drags in a lot of complexity, but what does it give us? More complexity! At the end of the day, everyone will probably agree that simplicity is important. And what we want to achieve is a simple thing: displaying some information to a user. So why all that complexity?
— Read more... →Devoxx 2023: First Impressions
This week, I’ve been attending Devoxx Belgium. It wasn’t my first time around, so I more or less knew what to expect in terms of atmosphere, content and people. In this post, I will share my first impressions. It includes some interesting talks that I joined. Of course, there were more - but those require a larger post, so those may end up in a seperate post later.
— Read more... →