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.

Also, have a look at my book "Developer on the Stage".

 
 
 
 

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.

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.

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