Welcome!

... to the digital home of Steven Schwenke.

This site is supposed to be a showcase for my thoughts about software engineering, less a personal homepage. If you want to know more about me, invite me to a beer.

Lessons Learned in February 2017

10 Mar 2017
Posted by Steven

This is what I learned in February 2017:

folder.listFiles() may produce NullPointerException

28 Feb 2017
Posted by Steven

Yesterday, I noticed a strange warning during a code review. IntelliJ IDEA warned me about this code:

No database tables visible in IntelliJ IDEA

22 Feb 2017
Posted by Steven

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:

Lessons Learned in January 2017

07 Feb 2017
Posted by Steven

This is what I learned in January 2017:

Feedback via sweets

05 Feb 2017
Posted by Steven

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.

How we do estimation meetings

15 Jan 2017
Posted by Steven

Recently, my team changed the schedule for estimation meetings. I use this opportunity to explain how we manage estimating the user stories in our backlog. This article is only about organizational aspects. Some thoughts about how to get to specific estimations can be found in my article "dealing with estimations".

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