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.

 

Extendable search pane in JavaFX

07 Feb 2014
Posted by Steven

Yesterday, I implemented an extendable search pane in JavaFX. Having searched the web for a ready to use component, I found that most of the search panes hover above other nodes. But what if I want to extend the search pane by resizing other nodes, for example the results table? That is the only way to see all search results and all search options at the same time. This is what I build:

SSCCE - Short, Self Contained, Correct Example

06 Feb 2014
Posted by Steven

Reading stackoverflow and blog articles about development, I came across many code snippets and examples. Also, as the author of blog articles and stackoverflow help cries I myself put some of these snippets into the net. Some of the code I've seen and written was good and comprehensible. Some was not. Today I learned about the SSCCE principle that states that example code in forums and articles should be a Short, Self Contained, Correct Example.

Just visit http://sscce.org/ and read for yourself.

JUnit tests with Ant and Hudson

19 Jan 2014
Posted by Steven

One of my more persistent current problems is the setup of JUnit tests in our Hudson 3.1.1. After days of try and error, I still couldn't manage to make it work. This article documents my experiments and will hopefully be updated with the solution one day. If you, the reader of this article, came up with a solution, please contact me or leave a comment. Thanks! Please note that the source/xml listings are prototypic.

The first obvious steps are the setup of the hudson job.

I love bridging days

05 Jan 2014
Posted by Steven

The first two workdays of 2014 where a Thursday and a Friday. This was great because many people used these as bridging days. I didn’t. I got up early as usual and drove to work in record time without the usual traffic jam.

Writing great software vs the reality of commercial software development

29 Dec 2013
Posted by Steven

In the past year 2013, I made several proposals to improve software development in my project. Some of them got implemented, like having agile meetings with the customer. Others got refused several times, like setting up a serious fundament for JUnit-tests, only to finally got the attention they deserve.

An item of our team culture: The Gollum.

11 Dec 2013
Posted by Steven

The other day I returned from lunch and I found Gollum sitting on my screen. Gollum is a little toy figure that is given to a developer in case he caused problems for the team, such as breaking the build on the CI-server or commiting code with compile errors. I took a classic: I commited our database properties file with a wrong configuration.

Pages