This is the final report about my temporal stop starting new projects. (update #1, update #2).

This is a short article about a concept that could have massive mind-hacking effects. Years ago, when I first organized workshops for my employer, I got a "time budget" of a specific amount of hours for preparation and execution of the workshop. First, I misunderstood the word "budget" and thought I would get an amount of Euros to spend on whatever.

I just upgraded a Java project from Java 8 to OpenJDK 11. The project is running on a Cloudfoundry, using the Java buildpack. After successful deployment with the new Java 11, the application won't start properly and threw the a java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError. The solution for this is to add the following variable in Cloudfoundry:

The other day, I wrote about "Candy Tasks". These small tasks that can be completed in a few minutes and without much effort. If finished, they provide a nice morale boost and a feeling of accomplishment. I argued that everybody has small gaps of time during even the busiest of days that can be filled with candy tasks.

Earlier, I decided to temporarily stop starting new projects to allocate resources to where I can make the greatest positive impact, and I reviewed my progress in this feat. This is another status report.

Earlier, I decided to temporarily stop starting new projects to allocate resources to where I can make the greatest positive impact. This is the promised status report on that enterprise. It contains strategies I developed and the progress I made.

The last months have been great in terms of good stuff happening both in my private and professional life. I’m very happy with the multiple projects I’m working on in the company and the additional handful of pet-projects I’m doing on the side. However, life was so generous to me lately, that one or two opportunities too many have presented themselves to me. I often joke that 24 hours in a day is not enough time to act on all the great ideas. Generally, that isn’t a problem because most ideas can be stored away and acted upon at a later time.

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.