At the very beginning of 2014 I decided to start better documenting my reading habits and sharing them here with all of you.
The point is two fold – by curating and documenting, my reading has become more purposeful and diverse. Also – I believe that curation of good content brings a lot of value, helps people explore and allows the best stuff to raise to the top.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy these as we move in the latter half of 2014.
Here we go…
1. Java and Spring
>> Spring Framework 4.1 — Spring MVC Improvements
Spring MVC continues to grow and move forward with more flexibility, tighter integration with Jackson, better testing support and a host of other improvements. It’s going to be cool using these in less than a month.
>> Writing Tests for Data Access Code – Don’t Forget the Database
A solid followup to the testing series – this one goes over best practices for writing persistence enabled tests. Even if you’ve been doing that for years, there are still some useful takeaways in here.
>> Spring 4.1 and Java 8: java.util.Optional as a @RequestParam, @RequestHeader and @MatrixVariable in Spring MVC
A quick and to the point look at how we can now use Optional within spring MVC 4.1. Good stuff
>> Default Methods: Java 8’s Unsung Heros
A practical look at the newly introduced default methods in Java 8; this addition really does pack a lot of power in terms of how we can now augment older code with useful new logic.
>> The 10 Most Annoying Things Coming Back to Java After Some Days of Scala
Interesting perspective on getting back to Java after doing Scala.
2. Technical
>> AWS Speed Test: What are the Fastest EC2 and S3 Regions?
The way of the land for EC2 and S3 speed – it’s a super useful read if your working on the Amazon AWS infrastructure (and so many of us are). This goes right to bookmark for future reference.
>> ComposedRegex
An oldie but a goodie – regex should not be a big block of text you have to parse visually by counting parenthesis and such. It should be – like any other piece of code – as readable as possible.
>> Incorporate domain knowledge into predictive model
Good intro on how to approach a new dataset and extract useful and actionable insight out of the raw data.
>> Chess TDD 11: Tying Up Loose Ends
The last mile of a supremely useful screencast series on TDD. Nuff said.
3. Musings
>> The Biggest Gamble of Your Career
A good framework on thinking, positioning, risk management and, ultimately – growth. It’s also a fantastic reminder to constantly step out of your comfort zone. Something I’ve been trying (but only sometimes succeeding) to do more and more of. The tricky thing about your comfort zone is that it keeps on shifting. What was out of my comfort zone 3 months ago is wholly inside of it now, which means I need to step outside again.
>> Using BDD as a Sensemaking Technique
In depth on BDD and complexity of analysts. Go have a read – a lot of this will look familiar, but the clear delimitation is nevertheless supremely useful.
