Last week I had to debug some unstable tests, which were only launched externally from Ant (launched from Maven). The tests were largely not directly runnable from the IDE, and did not run equivalently.
Obviously this is outdated practice and not good TDD, but sometimes we need to work with such assets anyway 🙂
Given that, how could I debug & fix these tests? Continue reading
When investigating complex issues with Maven or command-line tools, it is often helpful to capture the output to a file for further analysis.
This tip shows how to capture both ‘stdout’ and ‘stderr’ to capture a complete authoritative output. Continue reading
This is a confirmed JDK bug. Just three lines of code to crash the Windows JVM.
Continue reading
From the Classic Programmer Paintings blog. Enjoy!
“Operations and Developers agreeing on Git workflow”
Jacques-Louis David, 1796-1799, Oil on Canvas
(collaboration from @rpiaggio )
Software issues in Production can be some of the most demanding challenges a team can face, especially when occurring on a system outside of your control.
Adapted from the OODA loop — a military strategy used to describe the decision cycle of observe, orient, decide and act — this process formalizes an approach to take control, establish facts, and progress towards a resolution for even the most difficult problems.
Covering indexes are a crucial performance technique for RDBMS optimization, and one of the most effective tools in the tuning toolbox. When large joined queries suffer from poor performance, here are some tips to tackle the situation. Continue reading
One of the most profound insights I have learnt about OO is that class design — the shaping of classes & types — is best informed by what processing needs to do, rather than the ‘kind’ of entities it goes between.
What we are talking about here is behavior, rather than trying to categorize entities at rest. Program code only acts by being executed; classes & interfaces (types) are a mechanism to despatch that execution to specific methods.
This shows that OO is really about active behavior, rather than any other arbitrary notions of classification.
At this point, we’ll address a common interjection — what about bean-style entities, and their properties? Surely inheritance should just follow these! Continue reading
Since Java 6, a mechanism was introduced for Java code to automatically discover “plugin” service implementations for JARs within the classpath.
As well as being used by Java to find XML parsing & Image IO implementations, it’s an interesting mechanism & can be used to make user applications extensible too. Continue reading
Two weeks in Gurgaon engaging with and mentoring the Indian team. An amazing & vibrant country.
Real software sees entities (Customer, File etc) involved in multiple interactions. Simple OO examples model behavior in entity classes directly, but this becomes tangled as behaviors & interactions increase; and results in broken inheritance structures.
Instead of modelling these all in the entity, a more advanced OO approach considers separating behavior from the entity. We’ll consider key principles in this multi-part series. Continue reading