Posts

I have started studying Computer Science at University more than 10 years ago. Now, with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and a few years in the industry, I look back reflecting at the value of these degrees. Are Computer Science degrees worth the effort? Before going into details of what I wish I knew before going into the world of professional software development, I want to address the most commonly asked question, whenever the topic of degrees comes up: ...

Should I learn Java? This is a question that just keeps coming up. If you are just starting out as a developer, if you already work as a Front End Developer or even if you are from the .NET background, many people wonder if learning Java is the right career/personal development move. Let’s see how useful learning Java is in 2018. When I first started using Java, around 2007, it had a very mixed reputation. On one hand, it was a reasonably new and modern language, but on the other, it was infamous for its bad performance (not fully deserved in my opinion) and verbosity (when contrasted with, back then, very popular Python). ...

Thank you for reading my newsletter. In the last month, I wrote on Java, Microservices and creating amazing teams- as expected! I also wrote my first funny post – How to write horrible Java that was warmly received. Check it out! I continue my fascination with Java Microframeworks ecosystem in The Rise of Java Microframeworks . If you have not heard about them before, definitely give it a read. I have once again included a few articles that I found interesting, but don’t come from E4developer website. ...

Who wouldn’t want to work as a part of a happy and motivated software team? Wouldn’t it be great if every team you ever worked with was like that? Based on Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek and Drive by Daniel Pink, I will tell you how to make this possible. What motivates developers? There are different ideas out there about how to motivate people. The two most common ones are- bonuses (or other financial rewards) and fun work (challenging, interesting etc.). While there is some truth to both, they do not give the full picture. ...

Together with the growing popularity of microservices and light-weight REST API, we are witnessing another trend in Java: the rise of Java Microframeworks. Javalin, Micronaut, Spark and many more make building REST APIs a breeze. In this article, I look at this exciting space and share my opinions on their use. What is a microframework? Microframework is a minimalistic web application framework. What usually differs it from more traditional, large applications framework is: ...

Building reactive microservices with WebFlux is fun and easy. In this article, I will show you how to build a reactive “synonyms” service. Making asynchronous API calls with WebClient is likely the most common scenario for a real-life reactive microservice. Synonyms service – the idea I want to build a service that will return a synonym for a given word. Based on that I would like this service to translate a sentence into another one made completely out of synonyms. For example, I will have: Java is a good languagebecome Coffee is a right speech. It is somewhat entertaining and a nice example! ...

Your company wants to adopt microservices. You are either really happy or terrified. A change like this can be great for those wanting to learn and improve their systems, but it does not come without its perils. If you want to be successful you will have to be pragmatic… Undoubtedly you have heard about microservices by now. I have seen many people skeptical about adopting the pattern and its potential value. The good news is- you can be pragmatic about the adoption, taking what works best and at the pace that suit you. ...

Kafka seems to only be gaining in popularity. A few years ago you could mostly see it in Big Data engineering context. These days, Kafka is starting to power more common message-oriented architectures. In this article, I want to give you a basic introduction to working with Spring Boot and Kafka. Installing Kafka on your machine One common barrier to entry for people to hack around on their machines with Kafka is how tricky the installation can be. For that very reason, I have written “How to easily run Kafka with Docker for development” – I think you will find it especially useful if you are on Windows! ...

Kafka is becoming a popular addition to microservice oriented architectures. Despite its popularity, it may be tricky to run it on your development machine- especially if you run Windows. In this short article, I will show you a simple way to run Kafka locally with Docker. In order to run Kafka, you need a Zookeeper instance and Kafka instance. You also need these two instances to be able to talk to each other. ...

Thanks to my company – Scott Logic – I recently had a pleasure of attending the Devoxx UK 2018 conference. Among many interesting talks and speakers, there were quite a few Spring celebrities present. Juergen Holler (Father of Spring), Josh Long and Mark Heckler were all there. Here are my impressions from the conference. Spring is hugely popular This is hardly news for anyone interested in microservices, but the popularity of Spring can’t be overstated. Every Spring talk was full and the audience was very engaged. Spring is very much the bread and butter of Server Side Java in 2018. ...