Welcome!

... to the digital home of Steven Schwenke.

This site is supposed to be a showcase for my thoughts about software engineering, less a personal homepage. If you want to know more about me, invite me to a beer (which you are going to pay).

Dealing with estimations

28 Apr 2013
Posted by Steven

One of my weak spots as a developer are estimations. I simply cannot estimate how long a software developing task will take. In this article, I write about how I came up with an estimation to a bundle of tasks, how accurate it was and what I took away from it.

How to detect circular dependencies with Degraph

29 Mar 2013
Posted by Steven

Recently, a good friend of mine blogged about Degraph. Degraph is a tool to visualize dependencies between packages. Not only are these dependencies shown in a graph, but the nodes of the graph can be expanded so that dependencies can be traced into packages.

Lessons Learned: Apache POI

03 Mar 2013
Posted by Steven

In one of my recent articles, I wrote about my experiences in generating an Excel report with Apache POI. I want to  complete my thoughts by summarizing my experiences with the framework.

Working in the zone

02 Mar 2013
Posted by Steven

As you might have noticed, my posts haven’t been as regular as usual in the last time. The reason for that is a new project that needs a lot of caretaking. My first weeks in that project needed some special mental work mode that I will describe in this article.

Global vs local optimization

19 Feb 2013
Posted by Steven

One of my recent assignments included writing an Excel report with Apache POI. This report has nine worksheets that cover different aspects of one business concept. In other words, each sheet gives another view of the business case. After finishing my work on the report, I noticed I made a huge mistake: I didn't optimize local algorithms, which was a good decision. But I also didn't optimize the whole approach on the problem. That turned out to be bad.

My first achitectural kata

10 Feb 2013
Posted by Steven

This week, I practiced my first architectural kata (alternative link) with my mentor Jens Schauder and my co-mentee Thomas. These katas are meant to practice the process of designing an IT system from scratch, given a specific task. Jens picked one of the tasks for me which was to design a digital UN conference system for students. This system should serve as the technical infrastructure for hosting UN gatherings via video chat as well as one-to-one-video chats between the users. News events should be created by admins and shown to the users, which are students from all over the world who aren't meant to buy new hardware to use the system. In this article, I want to describe my thoughts about the task, the process of getting to an architecture and of course my failures in this solution.

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