Posts

I recently participated in a Twitter conversation about upgrading to Java 9. Like most of the people, my current projects are all on Java 8. Of course the question came up, why don’t you upgrade? Good question! Since I hadn’t even tried, I decided to see how far I could come… The component I took for my experiment is a pretty simple Spring application. It doesn’t use Spring Boot. It exposes a few REST endpoints, and calls couple of webservices over SOAP. — Read more... →

Almost two months ago I visited Devoxx 2017. It’s about time to write some notes on the stuff I learnt there! Event Storming & DDD workshop The week started off with a full afternoon workshop led by Stijn Vanpoucke. The workshop consisted of small pieces of theory, alternated with exercises using post-it’s and markers. A few of the theoretic pieces: An event is something that has happened in the past. It is usually phrased in past tense. — Read more... →

It’s been a while since my last post! I recently have been reading a lot about the idea of “API management” or an “API gateway”. There’s a lot of commercial offerings in this field. Many of them promise you (to some extend) ultimate flexibility and endless possibilities. My preference is for “lean and mean” approaches where I can pick the building blocks that I need. In the long run, that offers more flexibility. — Read more... →

This year, I had the pleasure again to visit JavaOne. Not only did I attend the conference, I was also accepted to speak, which was quite a dream come true. The session catalog contains almost 500 sessions, and I obviously visited only a subset of them. I found two topics particularly interesting and decided to attend multiple sessions on each of them. “Prepare for JDK 9” and “Migrating to Java 9 Modules” Both sessions where more or less covering the same ground, although from a different perspective. — Read more... →

Todays note is nothing more than a quick tip. I’m a big fan of the Markdown markup language, but sometimes I need to exchange documents with people who don’t know how to read them. Often, they prefer just Word or PDF. So I looked for a way to convert a Markdown file to a PDF file. My current solution is based on Node.js so you need to install that first. Then use npm, the package manager for javascript, to install the markdown-pdf package using — Read more... →

Recently, I found myself running tslint on a small React application written in TypeScript. The combination itself is worth writing another blog post about, but today we’re covering just one of the rules that tslint has; in fact, it is defined in the “tslint-react” rule set. It is also included in the eslint-plugin-react, because it is not related to TypeScript per se. What’s it about? In its ES6 version, the rule says: “No . — Read more... →

Lately, my interest for machine learning and artificial intelligence has revived. When I was at university, I followed some courses and specialisations in this field, but then during my career I hardly ever used any of it. Back in those years, complex neural nets and genetic algorithms took days to build, mainly because we didn’t have the computing power for that. But nowadays, things have changed, and such models can relatively quickly be built using a commodity graphics card. — Read more... →

Wow, that was a busy and inspiring week! In one week, I’ve visited two conferences in two different countries to give talks on two different subjects. But the most inspiring part came from attending other sessions. I’ll highlight one session from both conferences. JBCNConf 2017 On JBCNConf, I’ve attented a session by Burr Sutter about Vert.x. This was a session full of energy, as Burr is really capable of making your enthusiastic of whatever he is talking on. — Read more... →

A few years ago, I had an assignment at my former client involving Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana to build an operational dashboard. It was fun to do and very instructive; afterwards, I wrote an article about my experiences and spoke at various conferences. Recently, I was asked by another team in my company to assist them in setting it up for their team. A good chance to catch up with some old friends, and see how they have changed over the years. — Read more... →

Sometimes you have a piece of logging that is very important, maybe even part of a business requirement. In that case, you might want to verify that in a unit test, so you can rest assured that this requirement is actually met. How to do that? Mock it away A first approach might be to just mock your logging framework in a unit test and verify it was called as you expected. — Read more... →