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What’s in a Name: Architecture

The term architecture is used with slightly different meanings throughout the IT industry. This post clarifies what (software) architecture is all about - and which misunderstandings might linger on your way to common understanding.

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ROCA vs. SPA

Currently, a lot of companies are migrating from Desktop applications (mostly written in Java) to Web applications for their products as well as for their internal tooling. When they start with this process they often ask themselves: Which technologies should we use to build our Web application? Should we use Angular.js or React? Or should we go with recommendations like ROCA instead of a Single Page Application?

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Error Handling in Go

Rob Pike Reinvented Monads

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Solving the wrong problems

Instead of rushing to an engineering solution to a problem, we would often be better off by lying back and determining the root cause of our engineering problem, which is often an architectural one.

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What’s in a Name: Transparency

The term transparent denotes something translucent, where light can shine through. It is, for example, used in context of economics (transparent markets), meaning markets where much is known by many, and nothing is hidden. Sometimes geeks tend to inverse this meaning, saying transparency where they mean opaqueness. This post illustrates that your favorite XY-framework by no means makes XY transparent for developers.

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Transclusion in self-contained systems
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Triple Booting a Mac

Installing a triple-boot environment on a Macbook Pro is not as straight-forward as one might think or read on the internet. This guide explains how to install Windows 10 and Linux (Ubuntu) alongside with OSX and share data via a common partition. As an add-on, I explain how to access the raw partitions to boot the foreign OS not only natively but also in a virtual machine.

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Why RESTful communication between microservices can be perfectly fine

Recent debates about REST versus message passing in microservice communication have led to some confusion. What is meant with asynchronous communication in this context and why is REST a perfectly valid choice?

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Horizontal automation – a waste of time.
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Web Scraping

This blog post provides examples how to implement web scraping using HtmlUnit, Selenium or jaunt and compares them.

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git pull gotchas

The ever-so-convenient git pull isn’t really all that convenient all that often. This piece explains why not, and what to do instead.

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iOS: Writing to Core Data in your Today extension
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Auto Layout in iOS: How to avoid the common mistake

Creating and adding new views using Auto Layout often results in missing views when running the app because the flag that determines whether a view’s autoresizing mask is translated into Auto Layout constraints has not been turned off for each new view. This blog post provides a solution on how to never run into this situation again.

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Play 2.4 with Guice and MyBatis

The Play Framework is getting more popular and Version 2.4 finally includes Dependency Injection as the default mechanism to access central resources instead of singletons. This blog post explores what is necessary to combine MyBatis with Play using its default DI Framework: Guice. Batteries (code sample) included!

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What’s in a Name: Consistency
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Reliable Web Clients

Microservices can make teams and systems more independent but also more vulnerable to the fallacies of distributed systems. Initially I thought this blog post is going to be about how to build reliable web clients with Akka and Akka Persistence. While this is an interesting topic by itself, I now think it is more crucial to first understand the underlying problems and trade-offs before we learn how to get around them.

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Declarative HTTP API Testing with gabbi

While HTTP APIs are ubiquitous these days, testing and documenting such APIs remains somewhat awkward: Tests usually consist of procedural code that is specific to the respective language or even framework - which is neither very expressive nor easy to maintain.

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A day full of Clojure - organizing the first German ClojureBridge workshop
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Per request debugging with Log4j 2 filters

Customers quite regularly call on me to support them when an application is not behaving as expected. On a development machine there are a lot of ways and utilities to analyse the situation. But troubleshooting the erroneous application behaviour in production environments quite often limits your tool belt to a minimum.

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What’s in a Name: Reactive

The term reactivity is overloaded with several different meanings. This post tries to identify and clarify a few of them…

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Using Vector Assets on iOS
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Functional Validation in Scala

Validation is something everybody needs eventually when working with domain models. The Scala ecosystems offers a wide rage of tools which can be used for this purpose. This blog post introduces some of the most common approaches by applying them to a domain model.

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Why You Should Avoid a Canonical Data Model

As an enterprise architect, you might be tempted to strive for a canonical data model for your systems’ interfaces. That’s not a good idea.

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Docker images for developers
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Scalable Software Systems

Scalability has long been one of the hallmarks of quality IT systems. When we hear this term we usually associate it with an upward scalability of the system. Generally, it seems to be about how much more throughput and load our system can sustain through additonal RAM, CPU or extra machines. Often, however, downwards scalability is just as interesting, that is, the behaviour of the system when only very few resources are available. Such flexibility is very useful, for instance, if a complex system has to go through a variety of differently sized development, test and acceptance environments before it is provisioned in the live system.