I’m not a marketing guy. Actually, there are some issues involving me that would qualify as anti-marketing. However, I know some awesome things I perceive as great marketing. Here is a list of four of them, in no particular order, without being complete.

Kind of sneakily, I mentioned before that I'm about to publish a book. It is called "Developer on the Stage". This book will guide you through your very first talk as a developer. It will help you find the right idea, structure your thoughts and build a talk that is both instructive and built on your individual experiences. You will learn about the different types of conferences and talks as well as how to get a speaking slot at an event that supports your first talk. A lot of small but important habits for the situation on stage will help you be well-prepared.

Recently, I bought a Moonlander keyboard. Since then, I'm trying to learn how to type again. :D Although I had a rough time working with the new ortholinear setup and also defining "my" layout with the awesome software oryx, it's a blast. If you are typing professionally, for example as a programmer or writer, do yourself a favor and buy some professional gear like this keyboard.

Recently, I finished reading "Friend of a Friend" by David Burkus. In this article, I highlight what was new or important to me. This text is not a complete summary of the book; instead, I recommend reading it yourself.

I'm a huge fan of Spring MVC Tests and already wrote some articles about this topic. If you are new to the topic, here's the official Spring documentation. A coworker discovered a features previously unknown to me that allows to test for the size of JSON objects returned by an endpoint like this:

ArchUnit can be used to test dependencies between packages in Java. I use it to test that application slices do not depend on each other, but are disjunct:

This article is about why annotating the Spring application class with @ComponentScan may cause problems when also using Spring Web MVC Test.

The code can be found here.

General Setup

The demo application is a simple Spring Boot application with a component scan directly in the application class:

This is a guide on how to approach me regarding job offers.

TL;DR

Currently, I'm not actively searching for a new job. This article is meant to be a guide for people who are offering extraordinary jobs that I would be a perfect fit for.

Stevens priorities

From most important to less important:

1. Content.

I want to do something useful,
contribute to something great and
add value
while having a positive ecological and sociological impact.

Spring MVC is a great way of creating REST interfaces. Many convenience classes and methods are provided, such as the Response Entity object for returning data:

There are common tasks in programming I never performed in a production project. Formatting currency is one of them. I only noticed that when I searched a library that would offer formatting methods. After searching for a while and wondering why so many libraries exist, a colleague found a surprisingly easy solution: String.format(). Here is some code to show how to format currency with plain Java.