A couple of weeks ago, I gave another workshop for my colleagues in Braunschweig, Germany. The first thoughts for this workshop came to me months ago. I noticed that all developers I know are proficient in reading and writing Java code. They know the language concepts and syntactic rules. However, some of them struggle with coding elegantly and efficiently. I realized that basic concepts of "advanced Java programming" are not known or not understood.

Couple of months ago, I started looking for a new desk for my home office. Changes in my project caused me to work from home a lot. Also, a colleague told me about how great a vertically adjustable desk is for his health. "It simply is the difference between backache and no backache." After researching the topic, I decided to buy a Hammerbacher XDSM for 751,75€.

In preparation of my new workshop, I read about the Golden Master technique in detail. Because this is an important method to deal with legacy code and is easy to explain, this article is an extract from my workshop.

Often I'm asked about my "special coffee" that I bring to work or serve at parties. This article is about how I produce my Cold Brew and why Cold Brew is the best coffee in the world. Let's clarify the last thought first. Cold Brew, which I came to know from science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, is a form of producing a coffee concentrate which can be infused with hot water. It's the best coffee because

Today I wanted to introduce Degraph in my project to track cyclic dependencies. This got me a java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError which I had never seen before. Here’s a brief report how I solved this.

First, I added Degraph to my Maven-build project by adding this to my pom.xml:

Automated tests like JUnit are a mandatory part of developing software. Recently I saw some bad things happening in a project that are good arguments for automated testing. I'd like to share them so they can be used as examples when convincing other people to test their software.

The other day I read an article in the Java Magazin which was about the different types of software developers. The page design-types.net offers a test which analyses what kind of developer you are through a couple of questions. Despite the fact that I'm strongly against these kinds of tests, I gave it a try. Here's the result: I am an "author":

While building one of my repositories with Shippable, I got the following error:

Some people call me pedantic because I seem to have a checklist for almost everything. I like that because it's true. :) Today, I want to share my Definition of Done (DoD). This is a list of questions I go through every time I finish coding a requirement, fixing a defect or doing another non-trivial task of software development. Every question has to be answered with a clear "Yes!" before I can consider the task done.

The other day, I tried to delete a couple of records from our database. Not a hard task you may think and I would agree with you. However, this database table had quite a few incoming foreign key constraints that made it impossible to delete records from it without deleting records in other tables first. Not knowing the relations between tables made it impossible to decide which record to delete in which order. In search for a solution I found Jailer.