Blog

Blog Post

Schema Evolution

Using Kafka, sooner or later you might want to describe a schema to specify your data structures. Since software continuously changes during it’s lifetime you’ll also have to evolve your schema. In this article we’ll discuss approaches and tools which can guide you in the realization of your schema evolution.

Blog Post

Automated code maintenance with OpenRewrite

With the large number of software development projects in most organisations, keeping these projects up to date with the latest security patches and framework updates can be quite a task. OpenRewrite is a library that provides an automated solution to this problem. Using recipes written in Java, it can perform large-scale source code refactoring during the build process, preserving as much of the original code as possible. In this blog post, I will explain how OpenRewrite works and how you can use it to refactor your code base.

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Micro Frontends With Ionic And Capacitor

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Testing your GitLab CI/CD pipeline

If you develop a pipeline as a service for other development teams you should treat it as a product and establish product development processes, a versioning strategy, etc. around it. Besides that, as potentially many teams will use and rely on your pipeline you want to make sure that new features don’t break existing functionality. This ensures that your customer base remains happy and able to deliver business value. Therefore you need some sort of testing and we will demonstrate a way to (integration-) test your GitLab CI/CD pipeline.

Blog Post

JDK 21, the next long-term support release

The newest JDK release, version 21, appeared on September 19th. A number of developers view it as a long-term support release that will be supported for at least the next five years. As many applications will presumably be updated to version 21 from JDK 17, the last long-term support release, we would like to take this opportunity to examine the relevant changes from 17 to 21.

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Containers for tests and local development with Spring Boot 3.1

Spring Boot test containers & Docker Compose

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Testing in Spring Boot applications

In addition to production code, we typically also write tests to discover and correct possible errors as early as possible in the development process. For new functionality, it isn’t even uncommon to write more test code than production code. At the same time, the tests should be as fast as possible, so they can be executed frequently without causing long delays. In this article, we explore how this can be done in applications based on Spring Boot.

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How to bootstrap a tech conference with a 100% women+ speaker lineup

A tech conference focused on data and AI in the midst of a hype around machine learning, and LLMs in particular. Fair enough. But what we had in mind when planning the first edition of the Women+ in Data and AI summer festival in 2023 went beyond the latest trends in data engineering, machine learning, data science, and MLOps. We wanted to celebrate the excellence of women+ in the field. And to take it a step further, we wanted to provide our speakers and attendees with a safe and supportive environment - not only for learning, but also for networking and personal growth. Did we succeed?

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No future-proof architectures!

Why future-proofing should not be an architecture design goal.

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Is Platform Engineering the new DevOps?

When companies transition to the cloud, they anticipate an improved developer workflow, shorter release cycles, and more robust end-to-end team responsibility. However, even after the admin team delivers the new platform with all its capabilities, software teams may hesitate to adopt it and assume responsibility. But why? Is it not every developer’s desire to control the process from committing code to deploying it to production? One possible explanation is a lack of emphasis on the developer experience during platform conceptualization. This article aims to identify common issues and explore whether platform engineering can help to address them.

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Concise Documentation – Revisited

You think architecture documentation is cumbersome and takes a long time to create? We will prove you wrong.

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Remote Mob Programming

At home, but not alone

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What is a Data Product?

A data product is a logical unit that contains all components to process domain data and provide data sets via output ports for analytical use.

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Improve your CSP with Style Nonces in Angular 16

What to do, to enable your Angular application to use style-src: nonce in a CSP for stricter security rules

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A natural language calculator

powered by a local LLM and node.js

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Accessibility on the Web Part 2

Not just the structure and technology of a web application can be designed for superior accessibility, so can its content. An example demonstrates how this is done.

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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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Does BI Software Make Sense for Development Teams?

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Accessibility on the Web Part 1

Creating accessible web applications is possible with only a small amount of additional effort and native HTML elements. This can be demonstrated by an example application.

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Build an internal development platform

We are currently breaking down our software into smaller pieces, such as SCS or microservices, and deploying them on cloud platforms to take advantage of their elasticity and flexibility. However, as our technology stack grows more complex, it has become increasingly challenging for our development teams to focus on business goals while also meeting operational requirements. In order to streamline the development process and provide easy self-service options, we are exploring the implementation of an internal development platform. To address these challenges, we have identified several open-source projects that can be integrated into our platform to enhance the development experience. Although this list is not exhaustive, it provides a solid foundation for creating a more effective platform. Our aim is to help development teams stay focused on business goals by minimising distractions and addressing operational needs.

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AI Tools in Business Environments

and which also make your everyday life easier

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Evolving software like an orchardist

Software systems are usually larger, overgrown structures that developers need to bring back into shape after some time. However, creating an overview of the sprawling conglomerate of software components is challenging, let alone developing a clear plan for moving on. This blog post uses analogies from pruning apple trees to show developers how to evolve their software systems using a value-based approach.

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Drawers for Product Owners

The duties of the Product Owner role are a regular topic of discussion. Because the role is understood in a variety of different ways, new and different terms are regularly encountered. It is time to take a different view that considers the relevant context.

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Running an AI Chatbot on Your Own PC

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Why Your Team Needs Data Products

Have you ever had the feeling that you or your team spends too much time on individual data research tasks or makes too many decisions based on your gut? Then it might be time for your team to start engaging with data products.