A Java geek

Developing software requires to model the world. We, we developers, generally assume that models are regular. It always comes as a surprise when they are not. All models are wrong, but some are useful. When it comes to dates, a calendar is a model of organizing time into days, weeks, months, and years. A date references a specific day in a specific calendar. During the course of history, there has been changes to calendars e.g. from one calendar to another, or even within a calendar.

At work, I’ve recently been asked to advise our engineers on how to write blog posts. A lot of such articles are already available. However, they tend to focus around two main themes: The technical publishing platform e.g. Jekyll, Medium, etc.Metrics e.g. readability score, SEO, etc. Beyond that, everyone is on one’s own. But I believe that writing a good technical article is as much art as engineering.

The subject of testing is vast. It may seem simple from outside, but it’s not. For example, one may define testing as checking that the software is fit for its purpose. But it encompasses a lot more: for example, mutation testing verifies that assertions do actually assert. In this post, I’d like to touch some testing flavors, what’s their purpose and how they compare to each other. The need for testing In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need testing.

Lately, I succumbed to nostalgia, and agreed to do some consulting for a customer. The job was to audit the internal quality of an application, and finally to make recommandations to improve the code base and reimburse the technical debt. While parsing the source code, I couldn’t help but notice a bug in the implementation of a Comparator. This post is to understand how sorting works in Java, what is a Comparator, and how to prevent fellow developers to fall into the same trap.

In my talk Introduction to Data Streaming, I demo an application that displays the location of all public transports in Switzerland in near real-time. Here’s a sample recording: The demo is entirely based on Open principles: the code and its dependencies are Open Source, and the data is read from an Open Data endpoint. In order to develop the demo, I had to overcome some issues by leveraging Open Data.

The subject of Open Source and OS licenses has been waxing and waning over time. Recently, it became hot again. In this post, I’d like to do a quick recap to set the stage. Then, I’ll analyze reasons for license changes. The rise of Open Source Before I actually started my career - even I was before even born - software was provided with its source code. The value was in the hardware.