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.

 

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.

Extending Java Enums

21 Oct 2012
Posted by Steven

I often stumble over ideas that are cool in some way and that I would never have thought about it. One of those ideas is extending Java Enums. Often frameworks and toolkits bring some kind of enumeration with them. For most of the tasks at hand, the elements in those Enums are sufficient. For the other cases, they can be extended to include more status. Of cause the library cannot handle the added elements in the Enum, so the methods working with it may have to be overridden. In this article I want to show how Java Enums can be extended.

First, let's have a look at the Enum:

Minimizing LOC as a metric

14 Oct 2012
Posted by Steven

Since reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I more and more do agree with the idea of minimalization. Obviously, he had huge success by simply leaving out things and concentrating on the rest. In recent months it became clear to me that this also applies to software development.

Two different architects. An observation.

07 Oct 2012
Posted by Steven

This article is a report about some observations I made during my time in two different projects. Each of the projects had one architect which, in retrospect, could not have been more different compared to each other. Both of them had great technical knowledge and more than 10 years of experience in IT. Both managed a legacy project that had more than 5 years of development time / uptime. However, my perception of the two was very different.

Six tipps for a successful start in a new project

29 Sep 2012
Posted by Steven

After changing the company I work for, I became member of a new project team a couple of weeks ago. In this article I want to describe what tools I used and what habits I use to make myself a productive coworker as soon as possible.

 1. Learning by repeating:

Spying with Mockito - to call or not to call a method

14 Apr 2012
Posted by Steven

The other day a weird feature of the testing library Mockito tricked me. Allthough the behavior is mentioned in the documentation, it can not be bad to point it out here. Maybe this article spares someones time debugging his code.

I wanted to write a unit test for the class Controller. Controller uses a method of Blo, a Business Logic Object, to perform its tasks:

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