belief driven design

Java 21 has recently entered “rampdown phase one”, and is planned for general availability in September!

I’m happy to announce that my book, “A Functional Approach to Java: Augmenting Object-Oriented Java Code with Functional Principles” is finally available 🥳

After becoming a workaholic in the last three years and spending 7 days almost every week in the office, it was time for a vacation and change of scenery: a 25 days trip to South Korea and Japan.

Almost 3½ years ago, I moved this blog from GitHub pages to my own little machine in the ether.

Besides lambdas expressions, Java 8 introduced another language syntax change in the form of a new operator, :: (double colon), to create so-called method references.

The first version of my Calibre export tool got released today!

Swift is quite a flexible language, providing you with many tools to modify and augment it as you seem fit.

Setting variables at build-time provides valuable metadata that wasn’t available when writing the code or even at runtime.

Even though interfaces and abstract classes have many similarities at first look, especially after introducing default methods, they have different use cases and capabilities.

The concept of traversing elements with Iterators is supported since Java 1.2, but got a new relative in Java 8: java.util.Spliterator

Iterating data structures is one of the most common tasks.

Dealing with date and time is a cumbersome task in many programming languages.

The concept of map/filter/reduce is a cornerstone of any functional programming.

Java is often criticized as being too verbose.

java.util.Locale is used to format dates, numbers, currency, and more.

As developers, we perform many repetitive tasks, big and small.

Shell scripting is a powerful tool available on all platforms, even Windows, thanks to WSL.

OOP allows us to nest classes that are logically bound together, to increase encapsulation, for more concise and maintainable code.

Dealing with Exceptions in Java is a must, and functional programming doesn’t make it easier.

Almost every developer knows the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, coined by Donald Knuth in 1974.

When we create a new data structure, deciding on its data types is usually a simple decision: text will become a String, non-floating-point numbers will be int, and so forth.

Exception handling is a mechanism used to handle disruptive, abnormal conditions to the control flow of our programs.

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.

We all know String.format(...).

Java NIO (“non-blocking I/O”) is a great feature set for dealing with I/O operations.

About 10 years after Java’s inception in 1996, Sun Microsystems released OpenJDK in 2007, a free and open-source implementation of Java SE.

The JDK is evolving with every new release, adding more and improving existing features.

Not many components live on their own, without any dependencies on others.

Many languages contain a REPL, a Read-Evaluate-Print Loop.

Git is packed with features and some can be very intimidating.

Immutability is one of the core concepts of functional programming.

By designing and writing code, we naturally start to develop our own personal style and habits, good and bad.

Java 8 gave us the Stream API, a lazy-sequential data pipeline of functional blocks.

With JSR-175, Java 5 gained a metadata facility, allowing us to annotate our code with decorative syntactic metadata.

Java’s new functional abilities come with a plethora of included types.

Java has different methods of comparing objects and primitives, each with its own semantics.

Java is a general-purpose programming language with class-based object-orientation at its core.

With Java 8 came one of the greatest additions to Java: the Stream API.

For a long time, I wanted to be more like a digital nomad: traveling the world and working wherever I got wifi.

Since its proposition in 1994, CSS has evolved from a static description of simple styles to a cornerstone of modern web design.

The human mind loves to simplify concepts to more natural, understandable terms.

Until Java 8, there was no better way to handle null references than checking your variables at every turn.

Almost no software project lives isolated without dependencies.

What to do if your favorite dependency is not SPM-compatible (yet)?

The signal-to-noise ratio is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of the desired signal to the level of background noise.

We looked at version 7 of Java before.

I’m always looking for a small-footprint laptop for traveling supporting my Linux-based workflow.

Code lines shouldn’t be too long, and many of us use 80 columns as a (flexible) limit.

Java was never the quickest language regarding new features compared to newer languages, but IMHO, this is one of the reasons why most of the enterprise world still depends on it and will in the future.

Initially, this blog was hosted with GitHub pages.