A few years back during a work seminar, I had the opportunity to dive into JS waters and see a bit of its beauty. Up to that point my background was C, C++, Java a bit NodeJS, but I never had the luck to see how functional programming really looks like. For those two months I was mind blown (in a good and bad way see JS ‘==’ ) since I had discovered a completely new way of programming.

Recently I had the opportunity to play with Apache Camel and Spring Boot. I found the result quite entertaining! If you haven’t heard the name before, it is an open source routing tool which can receive messages, process them and send them to other destinations. In my case, I was reading payment messages from one topic, storing them in a db and then scheduled request with a POST call to another server.

I am pretty sure most of us have used custom annotation in our projects at some point. Today we will go step by step and see how to create our own! Annotations in Java are everywhere, from @test, @BeforeClass, @AfterClass in Junit, @Override,@Deprecated in Java SE or @Inject, @Decorator in Java EE or @Entity in JPA. The first step is to declare an interface with @ .The use of @ denotes that our interface will be of annotation type.

When you hear the term load balancing, this can refer to many different things such as routers, TCP, UDP or http requests. Today we gonna discuss about the latter. Load balancing for http requests is the process of forwarding traffic as evenly as possible among instances of your server pool. Have in mind that your machines may vary in size, load or geographic region even so that’s not an easy task!

I guess some of you have heard about HUGO and how it is a great tool for building static websites. Personally I have used it for creating this blog and also for my father’s company website ptaino.com. I don’t have any prior experience with other static generation tools so I am not in a position to compare it to other solutions like Jekyll. What I can share with you though is my personal experience after using it, why I love it and tips to get started.

For those who haven’t heard the news, Java has officially its own shell, named (obviously) JShell since Java 9. It is a REPL type of environment where you type your code in the command line interface and see the results immediately on your screen. This is a good way to test simple programming concepts and ideas without the inherited boilerplate verbosity, which JUnit or main function has. Also semicolons in the end are optional!

Well last week, I had the pleasure and honor to present in a conference for the first time. It was GeeCon Prague and more details about my talk can be found here. Following, you can find my tips for those who want to start presenting but don’t have any prior experience. Number one and most important have a story to share about something you love doing or something that helped you solve problems.

Last Thursday on October 18th, I had the pleasure and excitement to present for the first time in a conference! It was GeeCon Prague and the organization plus the quality of the talks was really good, I highly recommend it to everyone! Something that I found to be really productive was that most speakers had a practical approach to their presentations, meaning a lot of code snippets and discussion with the crowd was there.

New variable type named ‘var’ in Java 10? Have we started turning into JavaScript anarchists? Has its very substance been polluted by Kotlin enthusiasts? Should we all worry by this new “feature” (are we sure its not a bug?) or could there be any benefits from using ‘var’ in our code? Var is used for type inference in Java and helps reduce the verbosity of the language. This means you are able to omit variables’ type, as it will be inferred by the compiler by looking at the right hand part of the assignment.

After reading ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ from Steve Krug I felt like Daniel-San from the movie “Karate Kid”. One scene shows Daniel’s frustration, after painting mister Miyagi’s fence for four days straight without learning anything about Karate. His initial frustration goes away upon realizing his mastery of the fundamentals. So what does both the movie and book have in common? You guesses it right, its all about the fundamentals! Plus you get a bit of secret sauce…