I spend quite some time implementing a login using Active Directory via LDAP for our Spring Boot 2 application, using Spring Security. This article outlines the implementation options I faced. On my quest to solve the many problems I encountered with this, I learned that there is not much documentation available in the web. I hope this article is of some help for other developers.

I will use the term "LDAP" when refering to the Active Directory because that's what most developers do when they mean "authorization using LDAP".

Somehow, I came across this great article about what to do to build a great work environment in an agile enterprise. In this short reflection, I want to highlight some of the (for me) most interesting thoughts.

Recently, I finished reading “Java by Comparison – Become a Java Craftsman in 70 Examples” by Simon Harrer, Jörg Lenhard and Linus Dietz. This article is a book review that highlights the contents of the book as well as some aspects that I found especially good.

From March  to June 2018 I have the great privilage to be the visiting professor for the course Software Engineering at the Ostfalia university in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, in representation of Prof. Dr. Bernd Müller. Most of the students study computer science and are in their 3rd term. This article explains what topics I teach and why.

The next issue of Java Aktuell (02/2018) will contain an article I wrote about Remote Working. This is one of my favourite topics since I began working with colleagues from Romania and I'm convinced that with the right methods and processes, remote work will enhance both work quality as well as the personal life. That's basically the core message of what I wrote in the magazine.

Recently, I facilitated another coderetreat. As in previous retreats, the participants who experienced their first coderetreat showed a pretty similar behavior. It occurred to me, that nearly EVERY coderetreat-first-timer shows the exact same behavior. This article is about how people will act, what they will code and what they most likely will learn during their first coderetreat.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave on of my "Writing awesome Java code" workshops. While I was explaining ways of designing APIs using lambda expressions, a participant asked a question that I couldn't answer. There was a simple lambda expression in the example code, the question was if it could be replaced with a method reference. I agreed and changed it to a method reference. However, the code didn't compile. That confused me, of course.

Yesterday, I noticed a strange warning during a code review. IntelliJ IDEA warned me about this code:

This article is part of a series about Java Forum Nord 2016, a conference that took place in Hannover, Germany. Links to articles about other talks I visited there can be found below.

A while ago, we fixed a really annoying defect in our code. Because we debugged for days without finding the reason for the defect, I want to share how we approached the problem and what the solution was. The breakthrough in this problem came when a colleague of mine reviewed our code and found a solution. So the first thing to take away here is: If you tried anything, ask a coworker to join you in the bug-hunt.

Our application has an HSQL database and uses Spring Data with Hibernate. Really early in the development, we encountered the following exception: