Java Software Engineer Weekly Newsletter (JSEWN-S2E10) - week 10 - March 9, 2020

Hello Software Engineers,

It is a well-known fact that learning new stuff for nowadays developers is crucial, but how to keep all that stuff in mind and don't miss anything? Here is the story of the guy who uses the ANKI app to make himself into a learning machine. I am also using it from time to time. Spaced repetition, which is the base of ANKI, is a really powerful practice to remember things. I definitely recommend you give it a try.

We are leaving in the era of reusing. If you are a startup and you have at least 2 participants then probably you will need to use thees 28 tools.

Have you ever thought about what will happen to you when you stop using Facebook? You will have about 60 minutes of free time each day, deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety. The study validates many of the ideas from Digital Minimalism.

The Cascading Productivity System. Working With Cross Functional Teams: Master Effective Collaboration In The Workplace. How to Save a Dying, Low-Morale Team.

If you’re someone like me who habitually clears their terminal, sometimes you want a little excitement in your life. Here is a way to do just that.

Java

New Features in Java 14 - this is the must-read for every Java developer. You just have to know about "Records", "Pattern Matching for instanceof", "Switch Expressions" and of course "Text Blocks" that we've been waiting for so long.

1. Getting Started With RSocket: Spring Boot Server - A nice overview of RSocket, a reactive messaging protocol for microservices that works over TCP or WebSockets.
2. Spring Autowiring – It's a kind of magic – Part 1 - An under-the-hood look at Spring's use of reflection to autowire dependencies into a bean class having a single constructor, without using @Autowire.
3. Tutorial: Writing Microservices in Kotlin with Ktor—a Multiplatform Framework for Connected Systems - And a quick look at Ktor, a Kotlin framework from JetBrains for building multi-platform client and server applications.
4. Serializing Records - Java 14 Records (JEP359) reduce the boiler plate for simple POJOs. In this newsletter we look at what special magic is used to serialize and deserialize these new records.

Engineering

Have you ever heard about such a position as Engineering Manager? Do you have one in your company or maybe it is you? Here is the list of tips for newcomers to the profession. Interesting to read even if you are not the Engineering Manager.

1. The versatility of Kubernetes' initContainer - An intro to initContainer, which allows us to customize the execution of immutable images at runtime.
2. Spy vs. spy – aka “The two sides of the testing coin” - As for every other topic, there is also no silver bullet approach for testing, but there are some practices which have become established over the past years.
3. Everything You Need to Know About the Interface Segregation Principle - I bet you heard about it hundreds of times, but do you actually know what is it?
4. Quarkus tests with Testcontainers and PostgreSQL - in case you missed this awesome library.

Databases

1. 5 Ways to Better Understand SQL by Adding Optional Parentheses — Even if you’re an expert, SQL can sometimes seem like a bit of a messy beast and identifying which elements of syntax have which behavior can be tricky, especially compared to other languages. Lukas provides some pointers for examining SQL’s behavior by using parentheses.
2. NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB Now Generally Available — A tool (for both macOS and Windows) to help you build and visualize high-performance data models and accelerate the development of DynamoDB operations.
3. Why Graph Will Win — Of course, the co-creator of a graph database is going to say “20 years from now, non-graph databases will be niche and legacy applications” but Kevin has some interesting insights nonetheless
4. SQL's DISTINCT Is Not A Function — Lukas continues to dish out the SQL knowledge.
5. Top 4 Database Design Tools - In this article, explore a comparison of four of the best database design tools.
6. Time Series for Developers: What the Heck Is Time-Series Data? - This post seeks to illustrate the power of time-series data by looking at a real-world scenario using a public dataset from the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission.

You could check out previous issues at my site, telegram or twitter.