Developer Champion
A few glasses of fizzy were consumed during the JetBrains party at Devoxx Belgium last year:
Holly: You do presentations about productivity, and about developer happiness, and I do presentations about developer joy. We should do a presentation together!
Me: Yes! What a fantastic idea! Two titans of the London Java Community co-presenting on a topic that excites us both!
This is the story of how that went
Continue reading "Are Developer Productivity and Developer Joy opposites?"
I ran a poll asking my followers which content to produce for Dave's Continuous Delivery YouTube channel. I found it interesting, but I guess not all that surprising, that the results depend upon who you ask.
Continue reading "In which we discover the audience really matters"
I freaking HATE flaky tests.
The first time I worked in an environment that had real Continuous Integration with Actual Automated Tests that Actually Ran, it was like... freedom. We literally got the green light that our new code was working as expected, and that any changes we made hadn't broken anything. And refactoring... before then, I don't think I had ever really refactored anything. Even a simple rename was fraught with danger, you never knew if reflection or some sort of odd log-file parsing was dependent upon specific class or method names. With a comprehensive suite of unit, acceptance and performance tests, we had this blissful safety net that would tell us "Everything Is OK" after we'd done simple or extensive refactoring.
Except.
Continue reading "Flaky tests are poisoning your productivity"
Have you ever run a Gradle build that failed and seen this message?
This is a post I've been meaning to write for eight and a half years. Inspired by this tweet from Ceora, I'm finally doing it.
I have a question for parents in tech, especially moms.
How has having children impacted your career?
I wanna hear the good, the bad and the ugly. Tell me whatever you’re comfortable sharing 😛
— ceora🌸🌺 (@ceeoreo_) May 15, 2024
The most immediate impact having a baby had on my career is I needed to work much smarter not harder. Babies (and children) take up all that so-called free time, and and almost all of your not-free-time, that you used to have.
Continue reading "Working Smarter, not Harder"
I wrote a 3000 word blog post in response to a Tweet about how having kids changed my career (which in retrospect probably doesn't even answer the question). So I decided to pull this section out into its own post. It became a 2000 word blog post about planning, sigh. This is why I find it hard to find time to blog.
So here are my Top Tips For Time Management And Planning for Working Parents.
Continue reading "Time Management for Parents"
I'm about to jet off on my sunny* summer holidays, so it's a good time to leave you with my recommended reading and learning. Are they all my books and content? Yes. But I do have discounts and deals for them, so that's something, right?
Working With Code in IntelliJ IDEA (Online course)
I've just released a Brand New online course on LeanPub, Working With Code in IntelliJ IDEA. If you want to step through the most helpful features for writing code with IntelliJ IDEA, this is the course for you. We have a special introductory price if you click on this link: https://leanpub.com/c/workingwithcodeinintellijidea/c/eBRBFWYIyek8.
If you're already a subscriber (reader or author) of Leanpub, it's available to you for free.
If not, but you already own the IntelliJ IDEA book, I can give you a link to get the course for free, contact me.
Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA (PDF, eBook & paperback)
If you follow me on Twitter, or literally anywhere else, you'll know that Helen Scott and I released this book on IntelliJ IDEA at the end of last year. We're currently doing a limited-time-only offer where if you buy the book, you get access to our first IntelliJ IDEA course, Working With Code in IntelliJ IDEA, for free. You have to buy it before 6th August to qualify. Do it now!
If you want an e-version (eBook or PDF), I recommend getting it directly from Leanpub. It's also going to be much easier for me to confirm your purchase in order for me to issue you a discount.
If you want the paperback version (and let's be honest, it's nice to have these things physically in your hands at times) it's available on Amazon.
After you've bought the book, contact me and I'll give you a link to get the course for free.
Descubre IntelliJ IDEA
The IntelliJ IDEA book is also available in Spanish. It's feature-complete, we're just working through all the feedback from reviewers. While we're still doing that process, you can get the book at a discounted price on Leanpub. We also welcome feedback from readers.
Head First Java (Third Edition) & 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know
Head First Java is, of course, a classic, which is why I jumped at the chance to help update it to its current third edition. This version covers features all the way up to Java 17, so even if you're a Java expert, there will be some new stuff in here for you. I also modernised the concurrency chapter and added so much modern concurrency stuff that we had to split it into two chapters.
97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know was released in 2020, and with everything else that was going on at the time I didn't really talk as much about this book as I would have done. I'm very proud to have been able to edit this and for this to be the first book that had my name on the front cover. It's got a huge number of tips and wisdom in it, whatever stage you're at in your career, there's something in there for you.
I have a link for a 30-day free trial for O'Reilly Learning. If you sign up with this link, you can read these two books for free: https://learning.oreilly.com/get-learning/?code=HFJAVA21. You just have to finish the books in 30 days!
Modern Software Engineering - David Farley
At last! A book I didn't write! Although... Dave did very kindly ask me to write the foreword, which I was very excited to do because I loved this book so much. I read this book in less than a week when I was on summer vacation back in 2021, and I highly recommend it as summer reading. It covers a whole bunch of topics that qualify as "Software Engineering", but it's not stuffy or academic, and Dave's writing style makes it clear why these things matter. You can buy it on Amazon, or, if you used the 30 day free trial above, you can read it on O'Reilly Learning.
O'Reilly Playlist
Oh OK, I should recommend some other stuff I didn't write. I actually curated an "Expert Playlist" on the O'Reilly platform called Becoming a Better Programmer. So, you can use the 30-day free trial link to check out that playlist.
More Learning
I'm hosting my first online training for Gradle next week. I'll be teaching Gradle Enterprise for Developers. Note that this is not about the Gradle build tool. In fact, Gradle Enterprise works for Gradle and Maven, and also has functionality for Bazel. You can attend virtually to find out more.
I'm also presenting at the Manchester Java User Group and the London Java Community in August, and Madrid Java User Group in September. If you're local to any of those areas, keep an eye on those websites and sign up when my events are published.
And Finally
As you can see from this blog, I have quite a few projects and ideas in progress or brewing. I've been investigating using substack to publish news and updates. There's nothing there right at this second, but if you are interested in receiving news about new or updated books, courses, events, and even blog posts, subscribe here.
Happy summer learning!
* I'm going to England. It's definitely not going to be sunny.
I'm working on a new talk which aims to address some of the issues that face developers when it comes to running automated tests. Please take my super-scientific survey so that I can take a look at the real issues facing developers, and structure my talk around them. Thanks!
These days, distributed version control systems like Git have "won the war" of version control. One of the arguments I used to hear when DVCSs were gaining traction was around how easy it is to branch and merge with a VCS like Git. However, I'm a big fan of Trunk-Based Development (TBD), and I want to tell you why.
With trunk-based development, all developers work on a single branch (e.g. 'main'). You might have read or heard Martin Fowler or Dave Farley talking about it. It was when I was working with Dave (around about the time that Git was rapidly becoming the "go-to" version control system) that I really saw the benefits of trunk-based development for the team, particularly in an environment that was pioneering Continuous Delivery - Dave was writing the book with Jez Humble while I worked with him.
In contrast, the branching model encourages developers to create separate branches for every feature, bug fix, or enhancement. Although branching may seem like a logical approach to isolate changes and reduce risk, several factors make me more comfortable with trunk-based development.
Continue reading "Why I prefer trunk-based development"
The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.
Plutarch
What should every Java programmer know? It depends. It depends on who you ask, why you ask, and when you ask. There are at least as many suggestions as there are points of view. In a language, platform, ecosystem, and community that affects the software and lives of so many people, and has done so from one century to the next, from one core to many, from megabytes to gigabytes, it depends on more than one could ever hope to cover in a single book by a single author.
Instead, in this book, we draw on some of those many perspectives to collect together for you a cross-section and representation of the thinking in the Java-verse. It's not every thing, but it is 97 of them from 73 contributors. To quote the preface of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know:
With so much to know, so much to do, and so many ways of doing so, no single person or single source can lay claim to “the one true way.”. The contributions do not dovetail like modular parts, and there is no intent that they should—if anything, the opposite is true. The value of each contribution comes from its distinctiveness. The value of the collection lies in how the contributions complement, confirm, and even contradict one another. There is no overarching narrative: it is for you to respond to, reflect on, and connect together what you read, weighing it against your own context, knowledge, and experience.
What should every Java programmer know? In the 97 things we have sampled, the answers span the language, the JVM, testing techniques, the JDK, community, history, agile thinking, implementation know-how, professionalism, style, substance, programming paradigms, programmers as people, software architecture, skills beyond code, tooling, GC mechanics, non-Java JVM languages… and more.
In the spirit of the first 97 Things books, each contribution in this volume follows a nonrestrictive, open-source model. Each contribution is licensed under a Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Many of the contributions also first appeared on the 97 Things Medium publication.
All these things are fuel and fire for your thoughts and your code.