Nicolas Fränkel

Since already some years, this site uses the Jekyll static site generator. Generating the complete site takes about 15 minutes. Some time ago, I decided to setup Gulp to minimize HTML in order to speed up page view for readers. This change added about 10 minutes to the build time, for a total of ~25 minutes, which is a long time…​ too long. I wanted to decrease the build time, so I decided to play around. The initial state A Docker image is used to build the site. The image is bas

There are two main use-cases for creating Git shortcuts: the command is used very often, and the shortcut will save a few keystrokes every type, and the command is used very seldom, and it’s hard to remember all correct options.

I was not a fan of assertions libraries at first. Whether assertions provided by the testing frameworks were enough is debatable. But those libraries provides the way to write custom assertions closer to the business language. While the intention is commendable, I always thought this path was a slippery slope. If one starts writing such custom assertions, then they need to be tested obviously. And then, when will it stop? However, there’s no denying assertion libraries make writing assert

It might happen that you need to deduplicate a list of items…​ coming from legacy code. The class - let’s call it LegacyObject has already implementations for equals() and hashCode(). It’s not possible to change the implementation, for fear of breaking the running code. And unfortunately, the Java API doesn’t offer a distinctBy() feature. In that case, a cheap trick is to create a wrapper class around LegacyObject, with the desired implementation: public class L

A derived attribute is an attribute computed from other attributes e.g.: The fullName is aggregated from the first, middle and last nameThe age is computed from the birthdateetc. Kotlin offers different options to manage such derived attributes. Let’s browse through them. Inline field initialization The simplest way to manage derived attributes is to declare a property, and compound its declaration with its initialization: class Person(val firstName: String, val middle

I’ve been recently developing a Spring Boot application, and to speed up my development speed, I added Developer Tools as a dependency. By default, classes loaded in the HotSpot JVM can be updated only if the later runs in debug mode, and only for changes regarding method implementation. This means adding an attribute to an class requires a full restart. DevTools is an improvement over that. It works by tweaking the standard classloading mechanism: one classloader is dedicated to librar

With Java 8 streams, it seems Functional Programming has won. Long live statelessness and recursion! Reality is a bit more nuanced: as always in software programming, it depends. I believe that the more tools in your toolbelt, the better it is. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In Functional Programming, every function needs to be pure: output only depends on input, and there are no side-effects. For this reason, Java methods to create infinite streams are not u

This is the 3rd post in the From Imperative to Functional Programming focus series. There’s a whole category of problems related to grouping e.g.: Given a collection of person, return a list of pairs with the first value the age, and the second one the collection of persons of that age. Given a collection of orders, return a list of pairs with some price range e.g. $0-$100, $101-$200, etc. as the first value, and the number of such orders as the second one. Given a collection of words, retu

This is the 2nd post in the From Imperative to Functional Programming focus series. Last week, we ported the migration of a Scala application from imperative to functional in Kotlin with the help of the Arrow library. This was pretty easy: the example was laid out for us. This week, I’d like to go for more fundamental stuff.

This is the 1st post in the From Imperative to Functional Programming focus series. Some time ago, I watched the talk FP to the max. While the end of the talk is quite Scala-ish, the beginning can be of interest regardless of the language. In the talk, the speaker tries to migrate a standard imperative-like application using a functional approach. I wanted to check if it was possible to do the same in Kotlin.