SMEs, Steer Clear of Microservices!

Parallel Integration Tests With Random Ports On Jenkins

A common problem when doing end-to-end tests is colliding ports on you buildmachine with parallel execution. With the technology stack of Docker, Jenkins and Gradle I’ll demonstrate one solution I use in my current project to start the backend with a random port and use it in the test execution afterwards.

Our situation is the following: You want to execute a test which starts your backend application and fires against it from the outside. That way you can make sure that your whole infrastructure of the backend is working, including the servlet container for example. But the problem lies in the small detail that such tests usually take a while to execute and therefore lengthen your job runtime while blocking a single port over the time of execution. So the simplest solution by just starting the backend on a fixed port does not scale well for larger teams where a bunch of jobs are executed all the time. Therefore we’d think about starting the backend with randomly assigned ports. The graphic below demonstrates what’s happening on a single executor on Jenkins.

Marcus Held

Useful Git Aliases That Ease Your Life

When you work with git you can define aliases to make your experience even more productive and elegant. In this short post I’d like to present aliases that I use frequently and how they work. And I’ll start with my favorite: git recent-branches.

Recent Branches

git recent-branches

This command gives you the following output:

The result of the recent-branches alias.

This command shows you all branches you recently worked on. That solves the usual problem of me forgetting the names of the branches I worked on.

Marcus Held

Never Design A Class That Knows How It's Used

When you design a class you should never design it in a way that the class itself knows how it is used from the outside. Breaking this principle will make it difficult for other developers providing other implementations. I recently stumbled upon an implementation of different entities where the implementation had to provide a unique id for itself. Why this is causing problems and how you better design such a situation I’ll explain in this post.

Marcus Held

Jenkins Bitbucket Branch Source Plugin's Webhook Is Not Working

In my current project we use Bitbucket Server as our Git backend and Jenkins with a pipeline multibranch project to build our project. For better integration of both technologies we decided to use the Bitbucket Branch Source Plugin . This enables us to trigger automated builds and maintain dynamic jobs on our Jenkins. But installing the necessary webhooks turned out to not be a trivial task.

The goals I want to achieve are the following:

Marcus Held

That's How Wrong Google Analytics Can Be

This blog is not very old yet. I just started it a month ago and of course I wanted to know if somebody is even reading it. So after a few days I included Google Analytics to get an impression of the visitors of my page and if I even have an audience here. But barely any visit got tracked and since I didn’t even filter out my own ip I had the impression that I’m basically the only user of my page. But that impression was wrong, which I noticed when I switched to server side tracking.

Marcus Held