At the very beginning of 2014 I decided to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung.

2014 has been quite the year, covering each week with a review. I’ve been doing a lot more reading to make sure I cover and curate stuff that has value and is actually worth reading.

Let me know in the comments if you’re finding my reviews interesting and useful.

Here we go…

1. Spring and Java

>> Writing Clean Tests – Trouble in Paradise

Maybe you’ve been writing tests for a while. And maybe you’re doing TDD, so – overall, you think you have testing dialed in. But, when it comes to testing, there’s always room for improvement. A lot of improvement.

I like this piece because of that – it’s not going to necessarily give you solutions, but it does raise a few damn good questions.

>> While You Were Sleeping: The Top New Java 8 Additions

Some interesting features I knew nothing about.

>> SELECT statements batch fetching with JDBC and Hibernate

Batching of SELECTs was the next natural step in this series.

>> Check out Dave Syer’s “Spring Security and AngularJS” blog series converted to tutorial

I covered each piece of this super-useful series over the course of several weekly reviews. The entire six parter has been converted to a single, clean tutorial.

Also worth reading:

Webinars and presentations:

Time to upgrade:

2. Technical

>> Your Tests Are Dragging You Down

Not keeping things in your head – seems simple enough but it can have a profound impact. When coding, it will lead to TDD purely for the design benefit, to thinking incrementally about your system and to a huge productivity increase.

And overall, it will of course lead you to overusing Trello.

>> Ed Burns Discusses HTTP/2 and the Java EE Servlet 4 Specification

HTTP/2 is coming. We live in interesting times.

Also worth reading:

3. Musings

>> The Myth of the Full-stack Developer

Very interesting read on being a full-stack developer and what that actually means.

>> Introverts as Leaders (Briefly)

A quick read about how being introverted can play into being a good leader.

>> Management style

A fun read discussing different styles of management / personas.

Also worth reading:

4. Comics

And my favorite Dilberts and XKCD of the week:

>> Introverted

>> A human vibe

>> Opportunity (xkcd)

5. Pick of the Week

Earlier this year I introduced the “Pick of the Week” section here in my “Weekly Review”. If you’re already on my email list – you got the pick already – hope you enjoyed it.