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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.

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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...
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Sharing to help myself

It's been a while since my last post but I have a good excuse. I've been in a new customer project (well new for me) for two months now and have absorbed a lot of new information on the technology stack and the project itself. This time I'll be sharing a short post about sharing code and how it can help the one who's sharing the code. I'll be giving a real life example of how it happened to me. My story Back when I was implementing first version of my simple-todo REST-service I used Scala and Play framework for the service and specs2 for testing the implementation. Since then I've done a few other implementations of the service but I've continued to use specs2 as a testing framework. I wrote about my implementation and shared the post through various services and as a result someone forked my work and gave me some pointers on how I could improve my tests. That someone was Eric Torreborre  the man behind specs2 framework. I didn't take his ref...
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Simple code: Immutability

Immutability is a special thing that in my mind deserves a short explanation and praise. If you're familiar with functional programming you surely recognice the concept of immutability because it's a key ingredient of the paradigm. In the world of object oriented programming it's not as used and as easy to use approach but there are ways to incorporate immutability to parts of the code and I strongly suggest you to do so. Quick intro to immutablity The basic idea of immutability is unchangeable data.  Lets take a example. We have a need to modify a object's property but because the object is immutable we can't just change value but instead we make a copy of the object and while making the copy we provide the new value for the copy. In code it looks something like this. val pencil = Product(name = "Pencil", category = "Office supply") val blackMarker = pencil.copy(name = "Black marker") The same idea can be applied in functions and metho...
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