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.

 

Hibernate: "Missing column id"

27 Nov 2012
Posted by Steven

This article covers a problem I encountered using Hibernate 3.0 and Spring 2.5.6.

Yesterday, I spend one hour to debug the following error from the Hibernate Schema Validation:

Using Dependency Injection

18 Nov 2012
Posted by Steven

One topic of discussion I encountered in every project so far is the “right” usage of Springs Dependency Injection (DI). In this article, I want to describe how this controversial feature is used in my current project.

SVN blame vs comments in code

12 Nov 2012
Posted by Steven

The other day I had a discussion with a coworker about comments. Often he annotates the parts of the code that he writes with his name / SVN name like this:

  1. // EXBLUB1

The reasons for this are:

Cutting edge vs Legacy Systems

11 Nov 2012
Posted by Steven

Recently, a colleague asked me, if I still enjoy being in the new team. I immediately answered that with an honest “yes”, although we both agree that our project is far away from the cutting edge of new technology. My coworker said that it is understandable that young developers rather want to play with new frameworks and new languages instead of building a Swing application like we do. Additionally, our project also is not a green field. It has been around for years.

How I deal with TODO comments in code

04 Nov 2012
Posted by Steven

„TODOs are jobs that the programmer thinks should be done, but for some reason can’t do at the moment. It might be a reminder to delete a deprecated feature or a plea for someone else to look at a problem. It might be a request for someone else to think of a better name or a reminder to make a change that is dependent on a planned event. Whatever else a TODO might be, it is not an excuse to leave bad code in the system.”  - Robert C. Martin, “Clean Code – A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship”.

Making a dent in the universe - as a Java Developer?!

02 Nov 2012
Posted by Steven

A couple of days ago, I finished reading „Rework“ by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. The book is about their enterprise 37 signals and mainly addresses founders. One chapter is about the motivation of work. Fried and Hansson state that “to do great work, you need to feel that you’re making a difference”. The own work should be part of something important and by doing it, one puts a meaningful dent in the universe. If one would stop that work, someone would notice. The own work has to matter.

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