Hot Topic

SMEs, Steer Clear of Microservices!

April 15, 2024

Latest Posts

Development Practice July 3, 2023

Are You a Carpenter?

Hi, What distinguishes a software developer from a carpenter? The carpenter produces furniture. The developer creates software. Imagine you go to a carpenter. You enter the workshop, see various materials, tools, finished and unfinished pieces of furniture. The foreman approaches you. He asks you about your preferences. You want a table. With an inset plexiglass top. For outdoor use. Matching your preferences and with his expertise, he selects the right wood. For outdoor use, it needs to be a weather-resistant material. It shouldn’t warp significantly to prevent the inset top from breaking.

Marcus Held

Development Practice June 29, 2023

Write your own PasswordEncoder. NOT!

Hi, Have you ever written your own password encoder? I haven’t exactly - but I had to use a homemade one. In a central User-Management-Service, the customer data of all users came together. And in this, the passwords were stored. Thus, when registering a new user, the same encoder had to be used. In practice - fortunately - it did not blow up in our faces. But it was highly critical. The encoding was not strong. The Salt was still based on MD5. Even at that time, it was no longer a strong hashing algorithm. The trivial solution to make it “safer”: Simply apply it twice. No one will think of that 🤦‍♂️

Marcus Held

Development Practice June 26, 2023

Laziness Prevails

Hi, Laziness prevails. Always. Countless times I’ve tried to adopt beneficial routines. I joined a gym - after a few months, I barely went anymore. I baked my own bread - after (admittedly) two years, I no longer did. I got up at 5 am to meditate and exercise - I couldn’t maintain this for more than 4 weeks. As good as these routines would have been, had I kept them up for years - they come with high investments. Carrying them out takes a lot of energy. To muster up the will, pack your things, hop on a bike, and head to the gym. That requires energy.

Marcus Held

SME Software Development June 22, 2023

El Niño

Hi, El Niño is back. The surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean periodically fluctuates. This seemingly inconspicuous change triggers a cascade of weather changes that extend their influence to the most remote corners of the globe. Floods in South America, droughts in Australia, and even snowstorms in North America - all caused by a few degrees of temperature difference in the Pacific. This phenomenon occurs every 2 to 7 years. This year, it’s that time again.

Marcus Held

Software Architecture July 28, 2022

Microservices are a Big Ball of Mud

Over the past years I attended hundreds of interviews. Many candidates proudly told tales on how they develop their projects with a microservice architecture. Often (I don’t want to say “always”, but from my memory I think it actually is “always”) it does not require many questions to see that they used a rocket launcher to kill a mouse. Microservices are hard. Everyone who experienced the pain of operating such an architecture can relate to it. The complexity kills you at one point or the other. You already had to do multiple refactorings of your architecture - because your domains didn’t work out. I wonder - why is this architecture so appealing to developers? And then I remember why I found them appealing 10 years ago.

Marcus Held