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
>> Eclipse Ships Tenth Annual Release Train (+ InfoQ coverage)
Eclipse Mars (4.5) is out – here’s what’s cool about this release. Also – here’s the rundown of the top 10 features in this release.
>> Building Microservices: Using an API Gateway
A must-read piece on using the API Gateway pattern in a Microservices centric architecture.
In my own experience, I found the proxy/gateway pattern does a great job consolidating and clearly identifying responsibilities in the system. It also addresses a host of problems like – authentication, CORS, service discovery and clients being affected by early internal refactorings of the microservices.
Overall, a very good read.
>> Writing a download server. Part I: Always stream, never keep fully in memory
Good caching goes a long way towards a well behaved server implementation.
>> Blue-Green Deployment With a Single Database
If you’ve been deploying software to production for a while, you’re probably doing some version of this process. Setting it up for the first time though – that feels good 🙂
Also worth reading:
>> The High-Performance Java Persistence book
>> AWS Lambda Update – Run Java Code in Response to Events
>> How to Debug Your Maven Build with Eclipse
>> Rx-java subscribeOn and observeOn
>> Real JARs have curves
>> Spring REST Docs 1.0.0.M1
Webinars and presentations:
>> State of the art data access with Spring Data
>> The Changing Face of Communications: IoT, REST, & Reactive
>> Sadek Drobi on Architecture, Scala
Time to upgrade:
>> IntelliJ IDEA 14.1.4 Update is Out and IntelliJ IDEA 15 EAP 142.2670 is Available
>> Jetty 9.3 Celebrates 20th Anniversary, adds HTTP/2 Support
>> AssertJ Core 3.1.0 for Java 8 release: New and noteworthy
>> Spring Integration Kafka 1.2 is available, with 0.8.2 support and performance enhancements
2. Technical
>> Upgrades Without Tears Part 1 — Introduction to Blue/Green Deployment on AWS
>> Upgrades Without Tears Part 2 — Blue/Green Deployment Step By Step on AWS
Another solid look at blue-green deployments.
>> Refactoring with Loops and Collection Pipelines
A practical, step-by-step flow of moving from processing a collection with a loop control structure towards a functional, lambda based approach. A very good read if you’re starting on that path.
>> A Story about How Just a Few Characters Can Make Such a Big Difference in Performance
The performance of a good vs bad regex, alongside a deep-dive into how the bad expression actually matches. A good one to have pen and paper next to you.
>> Amazon announces the Alexa Skills Kit, Enabling Developers to Create New Voice Capabilities (+official announcement)
>> New T2.Large Instances
>> Focusing on Spot Instances – Let’s Talk About Best Practices
3. Musings
>> 5 Tips for Being an Effective Tech Lead
Words to live by, and definitely a must read for devs that are transitioning into a lead or architect role.
>> It’s a Large Batch Life for Us
On the words we use.
>> Just Wear Headphones
A quick but interesting piece on wearing headphones to block out the noise of an improperly designed office.
>> Why offices are where work goes to die
Very good read on working in an office as opposed to being remote. This really hits home with me, as I’ve been mostly working remote for over a year now.
This style of work jives with me and my personality quite well. Overall, it’s of course highly dependent on a bunch of internal and external factors, and it may not fit well with everyone.
Also worth reading:
4. Comics
And my favorite Dilberts of the week:
>> I’m changing all my estimates to: To Be Determined
>> That idea won’t work
>> Apparently you don’t understand science
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.
If not – you can share the review and unlock it right here:
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A very cool but also highly useful view on latency:
>> Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know
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