Blog & Articles by Daniel Westheide

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Type-safe SQL queries in Java and Rust

In recent years, our industry has been in favour of strong typing and build-time verification to make certain classes of bugs impossible. How much influence has this trend had on how we can write SQL queries in Java? Let’s look at how typesafe SQL queries can be in Java, how this compares to what you can do in Rust, and consider the benefits and drawbacks of these different approaches.

Article

Nicht mehr Open-Source

Was kann man tun, um sich vorab dagegen zu wappnen, plötzlich für eine wichtige Technologie einem Anbieter ausgeliefert zu sein? Kann es auch eine valide Entscheidung sein, das Risiko bewusst in Kauf zu nehmen? Und sind die Risiken, die sich bei Verwendung von Open-Source-Technologien ergeben, per se geringer als bei kommerziellen Alternativen? Wie geht man damit um, wenn eine Technologie, die man verwendet, plötzlich nicht mehr Open-Source ist? Ist es sinnvoll, zu einem Fork zu wechseln, und welche Risiken bestehen dabei?

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Type-safe HTML templates in Java and Rust

The Type-Safe Web Stack, Part 2

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Type-safe HTTP routing in Java and Rust

In recent years, the trend in our pop-culture industry has been to favour static and strong typing as well as build-time checks over dynamic typing and techniques like late binding. Where possible, you are expected to use the compiler for correctness checks instead of unit tests. Even though the Java language is statically typed, its type system is often considered to be not very helpful. Web applications written in Java are traditionally bristling with weakly typed APIs, heavy use of reflection, and lots of annotations that are interpreted at runtime. Let’s see how far the trend towards build-time checks has been adopted in the Java ecosystem when it comes to writing web applications, how it compares to what’s done in the Rust community, and what benefits and weak points these techniques have.

Blog Post

How we cut our website’s carbon emissions in half

Between 2010 and 2030, the environmental impact of the digital world is expected to triple. While network infrastructure and devices get more and more efficient, all of these improvements are eaten up by more and more people and devices being connected to the internet, but especially by websites which are becoming more and more bloated. On the desktop, the average page weight of a single web page is four times as much now as it was in 2010. On mobile devices, it’s even more dramatic: The average page weight is ten times as much as in 2010. In the summer of 2022, we decided that it’s about time that we take action and start decarbonising our company website.

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What is Sustainable Software?
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Remote Mob Programming at INNOQ

At INNOQ, some teams successfully use the methodology Remote Mob Programming in customer projects, some of them even for more than two years. We asked four teams what their experiences with this particular method are and have been.

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Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne

Im Juni 2019 fanden die Scala Days anlässlich des 10. Jubiläums wieder in Lausanne – an der Geburtsstätte von Scala – statt. Heuer gab es nicht nur zwei Konferenztage, sondern auch eine ganze Reihe von Community-Events davor und danach. INNOQ war die ganze Woche vor Ort und unsere Kollegen berichten hier von ihren Erfahrungen.

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Blockchain Mining: Embarrassingly Parallel?
Blog Post

Blockchain Mining with Rust

Recently, at one of our yearly hands-on events, we took on the challenge of implementing our own blockchain. One of the core challenges of this is the mining of new blocks. In this blog post, I want to show two different approaches we tried out for this task, using the Rust programming language.

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The language of maths is not the language of your business

Abstractions from category theory can be powerful. But there are reasons why you may want to keep your domain model free of them.

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The perils of shared code
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Solving the wrong problems

Instead of rushing to an engineering solution to a problem, we would often be better off by lying back and determining the root cause of our engineering problem, which is often an architectural one.

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Why RESTful communication between microservices can be perfectly fine

Recent debates about REST versus message passing in microservice communication have led to some confusion. What is meant with asynchronous communication in this context and why is REST a perfectly valid choice?