I love playing chess. I also love programming. How to marry the two? How about playing chess against a chess engine (chess playing program) that I have designed and wrote? If you are intrigued- read on! This is the first blog post in the series about building my chess engine in Java. The rules of chess I assume that you are more-less familiar with the rules of chess. You have two “armies” facing each other, making a move after a move, until one side is guaranteed to capture the enemy king (the checkmate), or neither side can win- a draw. ...

You might have seen recently some Pluralsight promotion on my page. There are two reasons for this. Reason number one- I became a Pluralsight Affiliate and I earn by promoting their website . Reason number two- I use Pluralsight myself and I think it is a great place to level up your skills. In this article, I will explain why you should consider it too! What is Pluralsight? Pluralsight is an online training platform… Ok, come on, I am not going to bore you to death here! ...

*“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection” –*David Wheeler. In this article, I look at my favourite quotes relating to software development and what we can learn from them. “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection” David Wheeler I opened the article with this one, as it is one of the truest and most insightful quotes that I have ever read about computer science. You can say that this is another way of expressing Dependency Inversion Principle which states: ...

Spring Boot is the most popular Java framework for developing microservices. In this article, I will share with you the best practices for working with Spring Boot that I have gathered by using it in professional development since 2016. I base these on my personal experience and writings of recognized Spring Boot experts. In this article, I focus on practices specific to Spring Boot (most of the time, also applicable to Spring projects). If you want to learn about the Java best practices, I recommend “Effective Java” which I review in a separate article . ...

Have you heard of Reddit? It is an amazing place on the Internet, where people share links and ideas. It has also a very active programming community. I visit Reddit daily- you can learn a lot from people there and have some interesting discussion. In this article, I will tell you how I use Reddit and why I consider it so valuable. Reddit is not the only social media that I use for learning about technology. I have previously written about using Twitter for staying up to with the Java world . ...

In this article, we will look closer at a fascinating open source project. Meet Redis! You may be familiar with Redis already, in that case, you may be interested in the different use cases it has for microservices architecture. Read on to see how this “in-memory data structure store, database, cache, and message broker” can make your system better! What is Redis? I already revealed that in the introduction. To repeat (using redis.io own words): ...

You may know that playing chess is my passion. The name of this website- E4developer comes from the chess move I start my games with – e4. There is another passion that runs in my family – chess collecting. I have spent quite a lot of time in the past few weeks documenting that collection and putting it up online. Check it out yourself – www.chesscollecting.com Don’t worry- I will not write less here! I am just excited to share this with you, as it may inspire you to do that personal project that you always wanted. Creating www.chesscollecting.com was an immensely satisfying experience. ...

I have recently been writing a lot about microframeworks and my enthusiasm for them. Even though I think they are amazing, they are not always the answer. In this article, I will explore use cases, where a fully featured framework may be just what you need. What is the difference between framework and microframework? Before going deeper into the argument, let’s make sure we are clear what we mean when talking about microframeworks. ...

Thank you for reading my newsletter. I have some exciting news to share with you! I have started E4developer YouTube Channel ! You can visit and subscribe now. I posted a couple videos already, I recommend the Microservices Explained – Orchestration vs Choreography where I explain the key differences between the two. There is much more to come, as I explain in this article . Please give me some feedback. ...

Recently I have read and reviewed “Clean Architecture“ by Robert C. Martin. Very entertaining book. It made me think about the main quality that good software architectures exhibit. What is this quality? It is the existence of clear boundaries and well-defined modules. If you don’t agree with me- keep reading and I am sure we will find some common understanding. Divide and Conquer The famous maxim of Divide and Conquer (Latin: dīvide et imperā) is defined as: ...