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.

 

Updating an OSGI based software system from Java 6 to Java 7

25 Nov 2013
Posted by Steven

In this article, I want to describe how we managed to switch from Java 6 to Java 7 and get rid of some issues we found along the way. We use Eclipse 4.2.2 and had to change to Java 1.7.0u21. Our system consists of more than 30 eclipse projects that are managed by OSGI.

First, we installed Java 1.7.0u21 and added the JRE to eclipse. Because we cannot be sure that all of our users have a 64 bit system, we use the jre1.7.0_21-windows-i586:

Drupal: "Updating modules and themes requires FTP access to your server"

04 Oct 2013
Posted by Steven

"Just updating your Drupal modules" can become a time-consuming task. I just spend two hours doing that and fixing a misconfiguration on my server that caused the well-known error "Updating modules and themes requires FTP access to your server".

Using your mentoring group as peer reviewer

10 Sep 2013
Posted by Steven

One of my favorite concepts of self development is mentoring. My current mentor started mentoring me two years ago and has two mentees in total. One of the reasons why our mentoring is so successful is the proactivity of the people involved. Everybody is expected to bring new ideas and topics into the group so that we can learn together and from each other. In this short article, I want to elaborate a recent event that probably prevented me from making a fool of myself in front of a lot of people.

Dealing with estimations

28 Apr 2013
Posted by Steven

One of my weak spots as a developer are estimations. I simply cannot estimate how long a software developing task will take. In this article, I write about how I came up with an estimation to a bundle of tasks, how accurate it was and what I took away from it.

How to detect circular dependencies with Degraph

29 Mar 2013
Posted by Steven

Recently, a good friend of mine blogged about Degraph. Degraph is a tool to visualize dependencies between packages. Not only are these dependencies shown in a graph, but the nodes of the graph can be expanded so that dependencies can be traced into packages.

Lessons Learned: Apache POI

03 Mar 2013
Posted by Steven

In one of my recent articles, I wrote about my experiences in generating an Excel report with Apache POI. I want to  complete my thoughts by summarizing my experiences with the framework.

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