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April 15, 2024

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Other April 20, 2021

Some Thoughts about Personal Development Goals for Software Engineers

Personal development goals in software engineering are not trivial to define. In general, goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely). But in reality our field of expertise is that diverse and complex that it is not as easy to find those goals like in other professions. For someone working in the sales department a revenue goal is easy to define and to decide whether he succeeded or not. For us software developers it is different. In order to improve we need abstract goals that are independent enough to survive in our agile day-to-day business. I received many goals in the past, and a lot of them felt wrong, unfair and not helpful for my personal development. For my employees I took another approach. The overall goal needs to be to enable your colleagues and in this post I describe how I achieve that.

Marcus Held

JPA March 20, 2021

Should I Pass JPA Entities as Method Parameters?

JPA entities have a couple of pitfalls and consequences when handling them in your application. Especially understanding how JPA manages and synchronizes the state of an entity is essential to avoid unexpected behavior. This can be unintuitive when passing JPA entities as method parameters in Spring Data in- and outside a transaction. In this post I will explain a best practice when working with JPA entities and when it’s okay to pass it through method parameters and when you should avoid it.

Marcus Held

Clean Code March 6, 2021

Rules for Extension Functions

In recent reviews I stumbled upon extension functions which didn’t quite felt right, but I wasn’t able to determine where that gut feeling was coming from. After seeing quite a lot of them I came to some conclusions why that’s the case, and I gathered rules for me when extension functions make sense to use and when they should be avoided. I discovered an overuse of the language feature - something you often experience when you work with a new fancy language with nice features. In this post I’ll share my thoughts.

Marcus Held

Clean Code January 23, 2021

Don't Use The Builder Pattern in Kotlin

This week I was taught again that you should be thoughtful when applying patterns you read on the internet (which is ironic - because the same applies to this post ;-) ). This time colleagues heavily applied the Creational Design Patterns in Kotlin: Builder from Baeldung. Using the builder pattern in Kotlin in this example is an anti-pattern and in this post I will reason why you’ll end up with safer, less error-prone and less boilerplate when properly applying Kotlins language features instead of this builder pattern.

Marcus Held

JPA January 7, 2021

JPA Doesn't Call Persist But Merge Operation On New Entities

When working with JPA I prefer generating the primary key on the application and not in the database (check out this post from James Brundege ). Additionally, I also prefer optimistic locking and in order to use it you need to specify a @Version field in your Entity. But you need to be careful how to initialize these two fields. In this post I’ll talk about an error when you assign a default value for both fields in JPA which leads the EntityManager to never call persist but the merge operation instead when creating a new entity.

Marcus Held