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September 2020

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Software testing

Quality assurance colleagues (QAs) are not your enemy

6 Mins Read

Often we developers are represented as introverts with a big ego. And, most of the time, that representation is accurate. We prefer to lock ourselves in a dark room with a massive amount of coffee and create complex and beautiful systems. That makes us happy but also boosts our ego. Haven’t you felt like a god after completing a challenging task after 12 hours workday? I bet you have. We all have. Being a god (I hope you got the irony here 😊) with not so developed social skills sometimes causes problems in our relationships at work. One such a…

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Good books to read: Microservice Patterns: With examples in Java

1 Min Read

Microservice Patterns is definitely one of the best books on the topic. In addition to the foundations in building microservice architecture, Chris Richardson provides many specific examples. The author also draws attention to topics that are not mandatory in developing this type of architecture but would be useful in specific cases – Domain-Driven Design, Event Sourcing, and CQRS. The examples given are entirely Java-oriented (Java code, as well as libraries for Java). However, this should stop anyone working with another language and platform. The main ideas are well presented and can be implemented with almost any technology stack. The last…

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What is lazy loading?

4 Mins Read

Lazy loading is a very cool design pattern that is not often talked about. Many frameworks implement it without even telling us about it 😊. For example, .NET Entity Framework (all versions) support the pattern. But what is lazy loading? The idea behind the pattern is simple. By using lazy loading, we defer the initialization of objects (heavy ones) until we need them. That’s it. Let’s provide an example. We have a simple HR application. The application supports the tracking of employee records. Each record has standard fields like name, email, date of birth, and image (like a profile picture),…

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Best practices: Initialize collections

3 Mins Read

Yesterday I had to check a reported bug. The error message was “System.ArgumentNullException: ‘Value cannot be null. (Parameter ‘source’)'”. Code is in C#, and as you may think, most of the time, such problems are trivial. Trivial also was the way we could prevent it – to initialize collections. I started debugging the case. Just in 5 minutes, I saw that that problem was really trivial. What was the setting, and what was missing? We have a budget creation. A budget is a single class containing standard budget information (like a year) and a list of budget headings. For simplicity,…

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