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".

 
 
 
 

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.

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.

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