Until recently, I told my team to squash all of their commits on a given feature branch to just one commit. Every feature branch consisted of just this one commit and could be integrated into develop so that develop read just like a sequence of features. After further consideration, I changed that. Here are reasons for both approaches:

Pro-Squash:

I keep forgetting how to get the overall test coverage of multiple modules in IntelliJ IDEA. There are several ways, here's my favorite:

You can test this by cloning my tiny test repository.

Yesterday, I was working at the office. This is an unusual thing for me to do because since a couple of months, I'm working from home. My 6-headed team consists of three developers in Romania, one business consultant working from home in Hannover, one part-time project lead working from different places and me. It really makes no sense for the whole team or even the three of us living in Germany to share an office. So we are working from wherever we like.

I just read an article a friend tweeted: "You are not Google" by Ozan Onay. One of the concepts described is UNPHAT. Quoted from the article:

Next time you find yourself Googling some cool new technology to (re)build your architecture around, I urge you to stop and follow UNPHAT instead:

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

A while ago, I put together checklists for the articles I wrote in my blog and the talks I gave at events such as Java User Group meetings. Soon I realized that there are a lot of duplications between the two lists, because an article and a talk have one goal: Communicate something to others. That's why I merged the lists. Now that it didn't change in months, I want to share it with those who need help or inspiration how to write an article or prepare a speech.

Yesterday, I finally found a solution of one of the most unnerving problems with IntelliJ IDEA. When connecting to my HSQLDB, I couldn't see any tables. They are supposed to be visible in the PUBLIC schema, but they aren't:

Searching the wilds of the internets, I found this simple solution: Under "options", I had to check "Resolve unqualified references" like this:

A while ago, I conducted a full day workshop for my colleagues. In the middle of the day, I realized I forgot to decide which feedback technique to use at the end of the workshop. I used various ways of getting feedback during the years of giving workshops, but didn't feel like picking one of them. So I decided to improvise. With me, I had my usual "emergency ration" of sweets for the participants which hadn't been used yet.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave another workshop for my colleagues in Braunschweig, Germany. The first thoughts for this workshop came to me months ago. I noticed that all developers I know are proficient in reading and writing Java code. They know the language concepts and syntactic rules. However, some of them struggle with coding elegantly and efficiently. I realized that basic concepts of "advanced Java programming" are not known or not understood.

Couple of months ago, I started looking for a new desk for my home office. Changes in my project caused me to work from home a lot. Also, a colleague told me about how great a vertically adjustable desk is for his health. "It simply is the difference between backache and no backache." After researching the topic, I decided to buy a Hammerbacher XDSM for 751,75€.