Soul Power

Right now I’m sitting in the train back home from Düsseldorf to Mannheim. It’s been two exciting days at the GearConf, a conference centered around software development in teams. Thus the spectrum of talks ranged from rather process oriented ones to tool oriented ones.
Thursday began with a talk on whether a dayly release is really [...]

As I have twittered already, I am reading “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin right now. I expected the book to be a very fundamental one. Although there are a few parts I do not entirely agree with, I just rummaged throught chapter 11 “Systems” on my way home and was surprised how condensed Robert [...]

As i twittered a few days ago, I stumbled over a subtle issue in the core Java library. Not as extreme as here but one to raise ones eyebrows, too.
I just wanted to write a small method to access an enum value by its String representation or use a default, if the conversion fails:
public static [...]

I’m taking a break currently, skipping one of the talks here. Devoxx is actually the most exciting conference I ever attended and I want to take the chance to recap some of the impressions I got here. After 4 days of non-daylight, lots of coffee and coke, I really have to say that I liked [...]

Java EE development has been packed with lots of metadata since day one. Things have changed a lot over times and we have been provided with more elegant solutions. I don’t want to go deeply into the ongoing debate on Annotations versus XML but rather go one step back and discuss metadata on a more [...]

A few minutes ago I once again stumbled on the strange fact, that every now and then I unconciously apply development concepts to my everyday life or at least detect concepts or violations of ‘em. Just now, we decided to order lunch at the chinese restaurant round the corner. Rummaging through the restaurants brochure, guess [...]

Fellow developer David Linsin wrote a blogpost about validation of domain objects recently. I actually wanted to leave him a reply but it got kinda long so I decided to post it here. So this is what came to my mind:
Prototyping some web portal kind of software I’ve encountered a similar situation. Take a User [...]

There are a lot of opinions buzzing around about how testing and test driven development helps you writing better software. Reading Secrets of the rockstar programmers just now, I’ve stumbled over an intresting interview with Hani Suleiman, co-author of Next Generation Java Testing. As this is a book purely on testing, you could expect him [...]