Remote teams are too hard to get right.
Author archives: Hans Westerbeek
The dark art of selecting your custom-software vendor
Usually I address a technical audience, but it’s about time I spent some time on you unfortunate people that actually pay for all that engineering that goes on. Why unfortunate? Because a lot of those custom software projects fail, for many reasons. Today I’d like to talk about one of them: not picking the right partner. Suppose your organization …
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It’s the QA Process, Stupid
Apple’s recent TLS/SSL fiasco has lead programmers from all walks of technical life to laugh out loud. My twitter timeline filled up with tweets to the effect of “How could those guys at Apple be so dumb to use goto and not use curly braces?”. The worst issue here was not sloppy coding, but something else.
Write unit tests with Spock: a tutorial to get you started
I like Spock Framework. I love it for its clarity, brevity and ease of adoption. So, I prepared a ‘lab’ style tutorial for Java programmers to convince them that it is beneficial to start using Spock. Get started right away with the tutorial by cloning the github repo, or by downloading the zip and typing ‘./gradlew test’ in the homedir. …
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No benefit in migrating from Spring to Java EE
Lately Oracle is providing a podium for people (you know who you are) who are telling you that you should migrate from Spring to Java EE. The first articles making that case started appearing a year and half or so ago but it seems Oracle isn’t giving up. They should, because the case their minions …
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Crap on your pizza
I have a friend who runs an Italian restaurant. He is of italian descent and his restaurant does well. If you happen to be in Amsterdam, grab a bite there. He and his family are proud of the dishes they serve, lots of thought has gone into them. So if you ask the chef to …
Paying technical debt
Ok, so here is a fairly well-known Internet company called Booking.com, looking for programmers. These days, many companies like to think they can be picky hiring their engineers, but not Booking.com. They start out apologizing for their codebase like this: At Booking.com we believe that a good developer is a good developer no …
Functional Testing: lessons learned
Finally I got around using functional testing (some people call it ‘System Testing’) extensively in a project. This post lists what I’ve learned about functional testing and more specifically, Geb, which allows you to automate functional tests.
Consuming and developing and testing web services with Groovy and Grails
For a recent project, I used Groovy and Grails to both consume and provide and test webservices. In this post I would like to share a few of the highlights, and the rationale behind some of the choices I made.
Koans: nicest way to learn a language
Just a quick one to let everybody know how cool I think the ‘koans’ idea is. I think the Ruby guys started out with their excellent Ruby Koans and I certainly had fun doing them. I have already been a Groovy user for a while, so didn’t really need to do go through its koans. …