In many cases, when you have a method that accepts a mandatory string parameter, you want to verify that the parameter contains a value that isn’t null, nor empty, not blank (i.e. consisting solely of whitespace characters). While writing the check is easy, testing it can be a bit annoying.

This post shows how to create a Maven archetype that can conditionally include or exclude files while generating a project.

A flaky test is a test that can flip from success to failure without any code change. Such failures can be annoying and difficult to diagnose. In this post, I’ll focus on browser tests, where flaky tests can happen more often.

The inspiration for this post is the Python, Ruby, and Golang: A Command-Line Application Comparison published on Real Python.

TL;DR: I wrote a script that discovers git repositories with an outdated parent pom and then it creates a pull request on each repository to set the parent pom version to latest and greatest.

Having written my fair share of bash scripts last year, I decided to replace it with something else. This is how I decided to replace it with Python.

clang-format is a tool that can format source code of C-like languages (C / C++ / Java / JavaScript / Objective-C / Protobuf). It supports various presets but it is also possible to fine tune its behavior with a configuration file named .clang-format. It has quite a lot configuration options.

Sometimes it feels we’re reinventing the wheel, but with different names. Back in the days, XML was the cool thing. We had XPath as a query language. We had XSLT to transform XML documents into different shapes. We had XSD to validate the schema of XML. We had code generation and validation. We could generate web service clients and servers with WSDL.

A cheat sheet for Apache Kafka.

Using a microservice architecture allows development teams to work separately, delivering work faster and focusing on a specific part of the business domain. Working independently means that developers are free to make their own choices. While that’s great, there’s the risk of building the tower of Babel.