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Interview: How Atlassian Responds to Cloud Concerns and Over-Configuration of Tools

Interview

November 23, 2024

Latest Posts

Clean Code November 20, 2022

Don't confuse configuration and constants

From time to time I experience that an application is unnecessarily configurable. In a recent project I experienced how too many options lead me to feel much more complexity and increased my mental load. Looking deeper into some of the values I saw that these were actually constants that would be dangerous to change “on-the-fly” anyway. In this post I reflect on this and share my thoughts. In this project the backend processes data from an embedded devices that communicate through LPWA networks.

Marcus Held

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.

Marcus Held

Clean Code March 20, 2022

Java Bean Validation is an Anti-Pattern

The javax.validation package is widely used in our industry. And I don’t like it. I believe using bean validation is an anti-pattern. It hides business relevant constraints, it leaves the choice when a validation happens to other framework code, and I even saw cases where developers expected that the validation “just had to take place”, but it never happened. Of course, there was also no test for it. And speaking about tests - testing these business relevant constraints is painful as well.

Marcus Held

Other December 4, 2021

New Position and the Future of This Blog

Today I write an unusual post for this blog - A personal note. I recently took the responsibility of the System & Infrastructure department. As you can imagine taking over such a position comes along with a lot of work - especially when you didn’t get rid of the old responsibilities yet. That’s the main reason why I didn’t write a blog in the past months. But what about the future of this blog?

Marcus Held

JPA August 2, 2021

Prefer UUID for your Primary Key

In my last post I discussed the downsides of using numerical types for the primary key of an entity. We should avoid these issues all together by using UUID instead and in this post I will discuss the up- and downsides of this approach. Using a UUID as the primary ID is simple: @Entity class Flat( @Id val id: UUID = UUID.randomUUID() ) Generate the ID on the application Similar to numerical ids we can generate it on the database as well.

Marcus Held