This is what I learned in May 2016:
- Read about State of Code Quality in 2016. Apparently, CodeReviews are the most important tool to ensure code quality. Also, they should be supported by good tools. I can support this: We are doing code reviews with Atlassian Stash for every change in our project and find code smells and errors on a regular basis (which is good because without the reviews these errors would end up in production).
- Recently, I wrote a many-to-many database mapping which could be navigable both ways. There have been several tricky errors with that. I’ve been told that such a mapping should only be navigable one-way. That solved a lot of problems. I think I’m going to avoid two-way navigation in the future.
- I noticed that the section “Code Katas”, which I added at the beginning of the year to my page, hasn’t been updated since. Code Katas are not working for me, I don’t do them regularly. Hence, I removed this section.
- Introduced TestFX into my main project to test JavaFX panels. Problem: Atlassian Bamboo failed to run these tests and crashed the build. As a quick workaround, I used Maven categories and the surefire-plugin to mark the TestFX-classes and exclude them from the build. That way, the TestFX tests can be executed locally by simply running Maven test. Bamboo however ignores these tests and runs fine.
- Introduced Degraph into my main project to make sure we have no cyclic dependencies. Because of a bad Maven dependency, I ran into an IncompatibleClassChangeError. Here’s an article about how I solved this problem.
- The new HackTalk event in Braunschweig, which I am organizing, is developing quite well. We have a stable number of participants and the topics are diversified and interesting. Parallel to that, the HackTalk in Wolfsburg is taking place every first Thursday in a month, also successful.
(Photo: adrian825, http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/monthly-management-reports-36658768)
