Skip to main content

Blogging from snowy Finland

First post on my first blog... Lots to say but can't deside what to say so I decided to start by a introduction of myself before we get into business.

I do software development for a living and that also happens to be a hobby of mine, what a nice coincidence. I work as a IT-consultant and I'm loving it most of the time. I get to see a lot of different environments and solutions but... there's always a but, I also see a lot that could be improved. With improvement I mean cleaner, simpler and easier to understand solutions.

I do most of my programming with Java, but I've had some experience with HTML, CSS, PHP etc. solutions in my past and in the last two years I've done some development with Groovy and modern JavaScript libraries.
Various relational databases have been part of my toolbox since I started web development with MS ASP and PHP over a decade ago. Recently I've also done development with NoSQL databases as a backend instead of RDBMS.
I haven't given a proper try to functional programming languages yet but I'll be doing that in the future first I have to do few other things.

Theme of this blog is going to be various aspects of my experiences and thoughts of software development. Perhaps even some actual code... or maybe I'll just put that in github.

Popular posts from this blog

Simple code: Naming things

There are two hard things in programming and naming is one them. If you don't believe me ask Martin Fowler https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html . In this post I'll be covering some general conventions for naming things to improve readability and understandabilty of the code. There are lots of things that need a name in programming. Starting from higher abstractions to lower we need to name a project, API or library, we probably need to name the source code repository, when we get to the code we need to name our modules or packages, we give names to classes, objects, interfaces and in those we name our functions or methods and within those we name our variables. Overall a lot of things to name. TLDR; Basic rule There's a single basic convention to follow to achiveve better, more descriptive naming of things. Give it a meaningful name i.e. don't use shorthands like gen or single letter variables like a, x, z instead tell what it represents, what it does...
Read more

Simple code: Integration tests

Integration test is something that tests a functionality that is dependant on a external system e.g. a database, HTTP API or message queue. Integration vs unit tests The line is thin in my opinion. The integration part can be faked or a embedded services can be used in place of the actual integration point and with these solutions the interaction with the external system is bounded in the test context and the tests can be executed in isolation so they are very much like unit tests. The only difference with this type of integration test and unit test is that the startup time of the embedded or faked system usually takes some seconds and that adds total execution time of the tests. Even though the total test exection time is longer all the tests need to pass and all the cases need to be covered whether there's external systems involved or not so the importance is equal between the test types. This is why I wouldn't separate unit and integration tests from each other within the co...
Read more

Simple code: Simplicity

Simplest solutions are usually the best solutions. We as software developers work with hard problems and solve a lot of small problems every day. Solving a hard problem itself is a hard job. Though in my opinion it's not enough to solve a hard problem in any possible way but a hard problem should be solved with a simple solution. When a developer comes up with a simple solution to a hard problem then they can declare the problem solved. First a disclaimer. Coming up with a simple solution to a hard problems is itself a very hard problem and takes a lot of time, effort and practice. I've seen my share of "clever" solutions for hard problems and the problem with those is that usually the solution itself is so hard to understand that depending on the size of the problem it may take a developer from hours to days or even weeks to understand how that "clever" solution works. It's a rare occasion when a developer has come up with a simple solution to a hard pr...
Read more