At the very beginning of 2014 I decided to start to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung.
Curating my reading has made it more purposeful and diverse – and I’m hopefully providing value to you as well by allowing the best content of the week to raise to the top.
Here we go…
1. Java and Spring
>> Reduce Boilerplate Code in your Java applications with Project Lombok
Quick and useful introduction to project Lombok and the ways you remove some of the boilerplate in your system by using it.
Personally I think Lombok is bit of a “treating the symptom not the cause” kind of approach – moderately useful but also a bit of an roadblock for a new developer picking up the project.
>> Your code coverage metric is not meaningful
I think this is a well known fact by now – code coverage doesn’t guarantee anything and should definitely not be a metric the business looks at, but at most something internal that the developer tracks and uses as a tool.
>> Java 8 Lambdas – A Peek Under the Hood
There are many intros to Java Lambdas – this is one of the better ones.
>> Spring Boot and Spring Data REST – exposing repositories over REST
A cursory look at Spring Data REST and how it can be set up with Spring Boot to implement a simple API. Quite useful to hit the ground running quickly.
>> Streaming JSON Patch from Spring to a React UI
It’s a good sign when a framework explores the fringes of the web and looks forward. This quick article is a early look at how you would stream data with JSON Patch over the STOMP protocol.
Might not jump in and use this one right away, but, regardless, it’s a very cool exercise.
2. Technical and Musings
>> Clean Up Those Nasty Junk Drawers
In-depth advice on getting to a better structure and grouping for tests – lot’s of great food for thought in here.
>> ChessTDD 18: RemovePiece and Housekeeping
The new installment in the Chess TDD Series after a bit of a break. It going to be interesting to see what being in a new codebase (and a Java one at that) will mean for the series – perhaps conventions leaning towards the BDD style.
>> move fast & break nothing
You’re evolving a system while that system is in the hands of real users. If you’re not – you will be (that’s the whole point of what we do isn’t it?).
Now that we established that – jump on over and read this piece – it’s not bullshit.
>> Faith in eventually
An interesting way to look at technical depth (among other things) – from Jason Fried.
It’s definitely a learned skill – to know what to solve right now, what to push for later and to be able to be OK with that continuously imperfect state of things.
>> How I Curate the IndyHackers’ Newsletter
This is both meta and also very appropriate to include in a Newsletter style article such as this weekly review. It’s a very interesting read about techniques and practices in curating a newsletter.
I’ve been writing this here weekly review since the very start of this year, and along the way I’ve streamlines my process and learned a lot of best practices, but I haven’t automated anything yet. Maybe in 2015.
3. Comics
And of course, the weeks XKCD comics – these 3 are funny but also a little bit sad:
>> Spirit
>> Listen to Yourself
>> Tones
4. Exclusive
Last week I introduced the “Pick of the Week” section here in my “Weekly Review”. The interesting part is that it’s entirely exclusive to my email list subscribers.
So – if you came to this article from my email list, you have the pick already – hope you enjoyed it.