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Lessons Learned and News in March 2019

This is what I learned in March 2019:

  1. During one of the HackTalk events, a series of community events I organize since a couple of years, I learned about home automation with OpenHAB. Years ago, I bought a RasperryPi to implement some automation for my home. However, this project never really launched.
  2. n my ongoing quest to learn web technologies, especially Angular, a coworker recommendet ngx ROCKET to me. It’s a generator like JHipster that will generate an Angular app with several options to choose from.
  3. Two events brought a lot of my attention to the newer versions of Java: First, I am migrating my main project from Java 8 to Java 11, possibly 12. Second, the visit of the great Javaland conference once again made me aware of the need to keep an eye on the new versions of my main language. Because of the new release cycle, upgrades are coming much faster now and it will be easy to loose track. Because of the migration project and the conference, I’m learning about the new language features and their background.
  4. I read this nice article about sparklines. Sparklines are visualizations like these (taken from the mentioned article):

Graphic about Gross Profit, Cost Performance and Schedule Performance

These are the books I read:

  1. I finished reading AdamTornhills “Your Code as a Crime Scene”, a great book about how to use data from the version control system to find malicious patterns. For example, a hotspot is a piece of code that changed often in the past. Analysis show that these spots will change in the future, too. Additionally, it’s more likely that defects occur in hotspots than anywhere else. Hence, it’s a good idea to know the hotspots in the code and integrate this knowledge in the decision-making for planned refactorings and future work. Besides technical, code-related analysis, Adam also describes social and psychological patterns that play a role in software development. For example, I learned about the “fundamental attribution error” that describes how personality factors are weighed as more important than hard facts. If a good-looking coworker makes a mistake, this error could be viewed as just a one-time-mishap. If a messy and not-so-good-looking colleague makes the same mistake, it could be viewed as yet another proof of his inability.

This is what I’m working on right now / planning to do in the near future / other stuff:

  1. There will be a conference. Not much more to say right now. :)
  2. I initiated a new-stuff-lockdown to clear my task- and projects-lists. Here’s my progress: status report 1, status report 2.
  3. I will facilitate a full-day workshop on how to work with remote teams in June.

(Photo: adrian825, http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/monthly-management-reports-36658768)