Nicolas Fränkel

When one thinks about hosting one’s Git repository online, one’s first choice is just Github, no questions asked. It’s so successful that it has become the de facto standard of Git solutions in the cloud. It’s so well-entrenched that developers are advised to use it as their portfolio. At first glance, Github has it all: public repositories, group collaboration, metrics, page hosting, on-premise install option, etc. Major players host their Open-Source code on Github: Sp

This week, I tried to improve my pet Android application developed in Kotlin. As I was very new to Kotlin when I started it, most of the code just looks like Java written in Kotlin. I will start simply.

Last week, a colleague pointed out to my team an online developer recruitment challenge. As I find it fun and there was no need to disclose one’s email, I decided to try, just to check if I could to it. The problem is quite simple but not easy: consider a rectangular maze of finite size. One has to find a specific cell on the board - the exit, starting from the origin. One has 2 move options: one cell at a time in one of the 4 cardinal points or jumping to any previously visited cell. Of

Since about a year and a half, I do a lot of presentations on Mutation Testing. In those, my point is to show that Code Coverage’s only benefit is that it’s easy to compute but that it’s meaningless - hence Mutation Testing. Since some time, I’ve been interested in Kotlin, a language from JetBrains that runs on the JVM. It’s only natural that I wanted to check how Mutation Testing could be applied to the Kotlin language.

This week, I had an interesting question on 'How in Vaadin do you add a lang attribute to the html element?' While it’s quite easy to customize individual components on the page, the outer html tag is outside our control. In this article, I’ll describe a possible solution to this problem.

I recently stumbled upon a post telling about the Josephus problem and trying to solve it in different scripting languages. For the sake of brevity, here’s the problem (taken from the referenced post): Flavius Josephus was a roman historian of Jewish origin. During the Jewish-Roman wars of the first century AD, he was in a cave with fellow soldiers, 40 men in all, surrounded by enemy Roman troops. They decided to commit suicide by standing in a ring and counting off each third man. Each

Recruiting is a complex process, and recruiting developers even more so. In this post, I will focus solely on the interviewing part (and leave the rant about recruiters who are paid 1 year of the candidate’s salary to just match buzzwords for another time). I recently stumbled upon an article about interview questions, again, telling you about 'right' answers for such and such questions. There are plenty of such articles on the World Wide Web, full-fledged sites dedicated to this topic an

Logging is for sure not a glamorous subject, but it’s a critical one - at least for DevOps and Ops teams. While there are plenty of material on the Web describing how to change your ASCII banner, there is not much on how to efficiently manage the log output. By default, Spring Boot will output log on the console and not use any file at all. However, it’s possible to tell Spring Boot to log in an output file. At the simplest level, the path where Spring Boot will put the spring.log