The Weekly Review on Baeldung is a curated list of the best stuff I read each week – a handful of articles that are well worth reading (in no particular order).
This is going to be a long one – lots of very good stuff this week – so I’ll cut right to it.
General Musings
The fact that TDD contains the word Test in there is more than likely the biggest source of confusion for developers. This is a valiant attempt to dispel the urban myth that TDD is about testing. Nice one.
A mature view on software development – there aren’t many of these around.
Podcasts were a game changer for me – I started listening to a bunch during a 12 hour layover in Barcelona (yeah) and never looked back. Programming podcasts worth their salt are an underrepresented category – which is why this article is cool bits.
In the famous words of XKCD, real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand. If you don’t have a steady hand – check out Bozhos earlier Why Not Emacs? for more insight about why sometimes an IDE is a good needle alternative.
And finally, since these are some of the best parts of my weekly reading (although this review is not going to be short and sweet) – I’ll link to these inline: one is about better dealing with negative feedback, and the other is about keeping an perpetually open mind and lean into learning and making small, incremental improvements. These add up.
Technical
The circuit breaker is definitely a solution that should be included into any system that consumes external and potentially unreliable resource – a good pattern if there ever was one. It’s also worth looking at Ray Holders guava-retrying project for something similar.
Martin Fowler has a page up about micro services. Is it worth a read? What do you think…
A worthwhile (and funny) reminder of the many ways to leverage SQL to calculate things. Es-Queue-El cracks me up even now.
Text mining can enable some truly interesting things – so I’m always chuffed when I find a good resource like this one.
On Spring
As always, we’ll start with some of the official Spring articles of the week:
Interesting read on developing an app with Spring Boot, Spring Integration, RabbitMQ and the new Websocket support in Spring 4.
Last week I covered a very interesting article about Tracking Exceptions With Spring over on Captain Debug’s blog – this week, I am personally following the second installment of that article and covering it here. The next one is already announced, so this is now officially a series – and a good one at that.
On Java
Very good read about using the new Java 8 Streams API with the JDBC API – a must read. It’s also a little bit sad to think that a more transparent and community driven design process for Java 8 would have saved us a lot of hassle.
An updated take on the age-old problem of testing concurrent logic. Good read (if you can get past the readability issues on the blog).
And that’s it for this review – pick up whichever strikes your fancy and read it back to back – actually engage and pay attention – to get the most out of it.
