Recent content on Thinking Inside a Bigger Box
This is the personal blog of Johannes Brodwall where I write about programming in Java, JavaScript, C# and about Agile Software development. I try to think inside a bigger box Who am I? My salary gets paid by Sopra Steria, Norway’s largest IT consultancy. I’m called a “principal software engineer” so I try and teach my colleagues and our customers what I know about good…
Resurrected! If you’re reading this, and you have visited my blog before, you are probably noticing changes. My blog was suffering from technical debt for years and I finally dealt with it. When I addressed the technical problems of my blog, I wanted to make something that could last without me putting an effort in. I think this is a useful lesson in software longevity. This blog used to be…
This site under construction I had a failure scenario with WordPress and PHP versions. As I think a static site should be created statically, I’ve decided to export the current content and create a new web site with Hugo.
(Technically, this is a blogpost about Oauth2 and not OpenID Connect) Are you using Slack as a central communication tool? Did you know that you can also use it as your identity provider for other apps you make or buy? For informal organizations like user groups and volunteer based conferences, Slack is perhaps already your communication hub. This means that the information you have about your…
The advantage of OpenID Connect is the fact that it’s standardized and widely adopted. This means that a library or tool designed to work with, e.g. Google accounts, can easily be adopted to work with e.g. Microsoft’s Active Directory or the Norwegian national ID provider ID-porten. Different Identity providers can support different levels of trust between you and your users. In my…
The advantage of OpenID Connect is the fact that it’s standardized and widely adopted. This means that a library or tool designed to work with, e.g. Google accounts, can easily be adopted to work with e.g. Microsoft’s Active Directory or the Norwegian national ID provider ID-porten. Different Identity providers can support different levels of trust between you and your users. The…
This Norwegian language blog post summarizes my talk at Oslo Agile Meetup in the beginning of October. Jeg tror ingen egentlig vet hvordan de skal få til bra utviklingsprosjektet. Selv når vi lykkes så er det veldig mye flaks. De fleste av oss tror vi kunne gjort mye bedre. For de fleste av oss holder tilstanden til kodebasen oss tilbake fra det vi synes vi burde ha fått til. Vi har lært en del…
Lately I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to fall into the trap of not challenging our ideas about the code we’re working on. In order to challenge the default mindset of Clean Code, I recently proposed to institute Dirty Code Monday (a proposal that sort of got me into a bit of a big discussion). Anyway, here is the report from the first successful Dirty Code Monday one week ago:
I recently did a few days of TDD training for a client. They asked me to help them test and refactor a class that created XML from an internal domain model. This gave me the opportunity to examine a bigger pattern. I wondered where the domain model came from. Looking through the code base, I found that the same or similar data structures were dealt with many places. As often is the case, I also…
My previous blog post took off on Twitter. It pointed out a problem: Insisting on the obligation to follow certain rules at all times isn’t actually helping people work better. The most common question (or objection) I got to the blog post was: So how do we teach new coders how to code well. This blog post is about that topic. First learn to collaborate The most important skill we should…
When your heroes start acting weird, you reexamine their influence on your life. I’ve long been learning, demonstrating and teaching clean code through TDD, patterns and so on. But when I look back, I am now worried that the ideas negatively influence my life and my work and that of others. Many who know me consider me an exceptionally skilled programmer. I got that way because I have often…
På grunn av sykdom ble intervjuet med mellom meg og Robert Steen 1. juni flyttet. Du kan istedet se oss live førstkommende fredag 22. juni. Jeg ble først oppmerksom på finansbyråd Robert Steen når vi ba ham om å holde åpningsinnlegg på Dataforeningens Software 2018. Som han selv sa på scenen: Å invitere en kommunepolitiker til å åpne en IT-konferanse kan virke litt rart. Men Robert Steen er en…
For nesten nøyaktig tre uker siden var jeg så heldig at jeg fikk lov å sette meg ned med Torbjørn Larsen, IT-direktøren i NAV og prate med ham på video om hvordan man fornyer en stor offentlig virksomhet. NAV har de siste årene blitt et av de mest ettertraktede fagmiljøene for IT-folk og jeg tror dette er takket være Torbjørn. Konteksten av intervjuet var i Dataforeningen sitt nye samtaleprogram…
I’ve long time been a critic of the mechanism of compiler checked exceptions in Java. Whether you love them or hate then, one thing is sure: There’s situations where you don’t want to have to deal with them. The solution in Java is to wrap a checked exception in new RuntimeException(e) but this gives long stack traces without adding useful information. Sometimes, we just want to…
As the year comes to an end, I describe some gloomy clouds in our future. This Norwegian language article was first published on the web site of the Norwegian Computing Association. Hvilken fremtid overlater vi til våre barn og barnebarn? Endringstakten i samfunnet ser ikke ut til å sakke ned og en ting er klart: Programvaren som bygges i dag vil skape muligheter og problemer som vi så vidt kan se…
To avoid the big problems with projects, everybody recommends risk management. At the same time, I’ve rarely seen risk management practiced effectively. Do we identify the same risks and do we actually prepare to handle them? The ironic thing is that I think most projects have the same top four risks. In this blogpost, I explore these common risks. To avoid exposing my customers and…
Recently, my organization reached a big goal and we decided to celebrate by taking everyone out for dinner. What happened was a GDPR nightmare. Or was it? We sent out a Google Form with three simple questions: 1. What’s your name, 2. Are you coming to the dinner? 3. Do you have any dietary constraints? But wait! According to article 4 of the GDPR, “‘personal data’ means any…
We’re running Mobile Era for the second year on October 5th-6th and I’d like to share some experience on how we’re using scripts and Trello to help with the organization effort. If you’d like automating simple tools, this is the article for you. If you haven’t signed up for Mobile Era yet, you can leave a comment in this blog post for a discount code! Google Forms is…
If you are working with software development as a developer, manager or tester, then you will be impacted by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – the new EU laws regarding data privacy. In many ways, the regulation is likely to have as big of an impact as the Y2K problem. But this time it’s because of a good cause! And you cannot ignore it, as the fines for doing so can be…
Trailblazing the first delivery of a software system requires courage and conviction, especially on projects that replace existing business critical software. When I’ve been acting as system architect I’ve employed a number of tricks in order to structure functionality and technical solutions in such a way that we can complete these early deliveries without sleepless nights. The most important…
On the futility of understanding Is true understanding actually possible? I use my fingers to tap out keys on a keyboard and the light from your screen hits our eyeballs, but is it reasonable to think that there is any correspondence between the patterns in my brain and the patterns that were just created in your brain? Or are we just lucky if we have the same thoughts? I used to think that if I…
So: What is best? A native app or a hybrid app? And if you build a hybrid app, what’s the best framework to use? As with most interesting questions, it turns out that the answer is “it depends”. I often get questions like “isn’t Xamarin (or Cordova) better than build a native app”. Weeeell, it’s not as simple as that. Here’s a few ideas that…
(Looks like I’m back in the conference organization game again! After a few years of lots of travel and then a few years of lots of family responsibilities, this year I co-funded the Mobile Era conference. It looks like it will be a blast!) If your experience is anything like mine, most of the interesting projects around you are having a larger mobile component this year than last year. I…
At JavaZone this year, I gave the talk “Computer Vision for mobile Java developers”. Here, I live code finding conference badges in a picture. The coding is iterative and interactive and I use it to illustrate Haar cascades, Canny edge detection, Otsu thresholding, contour detection, erosion and dilation and contour analysis. In my experience, developing a good algorithm with OpenCV is…
Er det noen som sammenligner omfang og kostnad på IT prosjekter i Norge? Jeg tror man kunne få noen interessante innsikter dersom man gjorde dette riktig. (Jeg må unnskylde at teksten i denne blogposten blir litt vag - jeg ønsker å si så lite som mulig om de aktuelle prosjektene for å unngå å eksponere andre) Akkurat når jeg var involvert i et tilbudsarbeid for et prosjekt, var jeg samtidig…
Man kan lese fra moderne tanker på IT-utvikling at prosjekter er en avleggs arbeidsform. For de som har erfaring med utviklingsaktiviteter innen offentlig og privat sektor kan dette virke som en rar påstand. De aller fleste ser behovet for å unngå store prosjekter, men er prosjektet som arbeidsform virkelig avleggs? Det spør naturligvis på hva man mener: I alle de årene jeg har jobbet med…
As programmers, we have long learned that Duplication is the Ultimate Sin of programming. Even considering to duplicate something is almost unthinkable. But removing duplication introduces dependencies. If you and I use the reuse the same piece of code instead of duplicating it, changes I make may affect you. This effect can anything from beneficial (I fixed a bug you also needed fixing) to benign…
I was humbled and encouraged to learn that I was nominated for Nordic Startup Awards category of Developer Hero for my contributions to the developer community. You can vote for me or one of the other great candidates here. For the last ten years, I have felt that the main pain points of the software development world could be fixed by empowering and inspiring those who do the work. From my…
I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 3 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. In order to get a handle on how to build a feature for your next iteration, take a trip with your time machine to the future to watch how the feature will be demonstrated. It’s often hard for developers to focus on exactly what tasks needs to…
I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 2 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. This is a trick that I learned from my User Experience (UX) friends. In many projects, the project members have a great feeling about the possibilities of the product they are building, even if they quite know if they will get there or if the road…
I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 1 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. Let’s say that you have a project that has been running for a couple of months. Looking back at your issue tracker and other artifacts, you notice that it’s hard to see what has been done and especially how much time remains.
Jeg sitter i styret i Dataforeningen Østlandet hvor jeg er med å arrangerer Software 2015. Software er en kryssfaglig IT-konferanse hvor vi samler spesialister innenfor forskjellige fagfelt for å få dem til å snakke sammen på tvers av fagområdene. På konferansen er det dagsaktuelle temaer og trender som står på programmet. Jeg er stolt av alle de spennende temaene faggruppene har tatt fram og…
Do you ever miss a command line to a web application? If you’re lucky, you may use a REST API with appropriate tools for the same job. This Christmas, I bought a Sonos system for our family. It’s a wireless speaker system that uses music streaming services. It supports both Spotify and Deezer, but works better with Deezer and it came with a one year free subscription, so Deezer it is.
JavaScript Promises provide a strong programming model for the future of JavaScript development. So here I’m playing with promises. First I need a bit of a package.json file: { 'name': 'promises', 'scripts': { 'test': 'node node\_modules/mocha/bin/mocha' }, 'devDependencies': { 'chai': '^1.10.0', 'mocha': '^2.0.1' }, 'dependencies': { 'q': '^1.1.2' } } Now I can write my first test…
The first commandment that any young programmer learns is “Thou Shall Not Duplicate”. Thus instructed, whenever we see something that looks like it may be repeated code, we refactor. We create libraries and frameworks. But removing duplication doesn’t come for free. If I refactor some code so that instead of duplicating some logic in Class A and Class B, these classes share the…
Whole frameworks have been written with the purpose of handling the configuration of your application. I prefer a simpler way. If by configuration we mean “everything that is likely to vary between deploys”, it follows that we should try and keep configuration simple. In Java, the simplest option is the humble properties file. The downside of a properties file is that you have to…
This summer has been the most significant in my life. While I don’t often write about personal matters in this blog, I will make an exception. On July 12th my son Leon was born. Healthy, happy and obviously, from the perspective a father, perfect. Going through this fundamental life change has made me decide to re-evaluate a lot of things. Most importantly, I wanted to evaluate my career. In…
Pop quiz: What will be the output of this little program? public class DateFun { public static void main(String[] args) { long hours = getHoursOfDay(LocalDate.now(), ZoneId.systemDefault()); System.out.println(hours); } private static long getHoursOfDay(LocalDate date, ZoneId zoneId) { ZonedDateTime startOfDay = date.atStartOfDay(zoneId); Duration duration = Duration.between(startOfDay,…
This article is dedicated to the ExileOffice team - revolutionizing the way we run our business in Exilesoft. As applications move more and more of their business logic to the client side, it falls upon us to simplify what’s left on the server to avoid distractions. My previous article shows how I get rid of lot of the boring and noisy code. There is one thing that the server will always be…
I once visited a team that had fifteen layers in their code. That is: If you wanted to display some data in the database in a web page, that data passed through 15 classes in the application. What did these layers do? Oh, nothing much. They just copied data from one object to the next. Or sometimes the “access object layer” would perform a check that objects were valid. Or perhaps the…
Working with web applications in NodeJS is great. Using the same language and libraries on the client and server simplified the thinking. And NodeJS has fast tests and restart for a super quick edit-verify cycle when you’re coding. I like to write tests to verify the server-side and client-side logic, but do you know that the whole solution really is working? You can of course test your…
One of my favorite ways to develop software is to do it together with others. Pair programming has always been a motivating and fun activity for me, but some pairings work better than others. When our team was formed we decided to pair program and rotate partners every day. I had lots of fun programming with Milina, Asanka, Manoj and Chamath, but my favorite session was the one I had with…
If need the same functionality in two projects, you should reuse code between them, right? Or should you? For as long as there has been a profession of software engineering, we have tried to achieve more reuse. But reuse has both a benefit and a cost. Too often, the cost is forgotten. In this article, I examine the economics of reuse. True story: One of the earliest projects to embrace…
I’ve started using an approach for software project estimation that so far is proving to be fairly transparent, quick and reliable. I’ve observed that within a reasonable degree of variation, most teams seems to complete about one “user-relevant task” per developer per calendar week. There are so many theoretical holes in my argument that there’s no point trying to…
This blog post is dedicated to my colleague Seminda who has been experimenting with how to create simple and powerful web applications. Thank you for showing me your ideas and discussing improvements with me, Seminda. I find many C# applications have much unnecessary code. This is especially true as the weight of the business logic of many applications are shifting from the backend to JavaScript…
In his article Horizontal Reuse: An Alternative to Inheritance Toby Inkster compares how to implement multiple inheritance or mixins in Java, Perl, PHP and Ruby. It’s a very interesting comparison of programming languages features and well worth the read. Toby writes: In class-based object-oriented programming, when there are classes that appear to share some functionality, this is often a…
Less Overproduction (of unused functions in interface between team members) Less Waiting (for the only person who knows a particular area) Less Motion (as everyone gets more skilled) Fewer Defects (because two pair of eyes see better than one) Less Over-processing (from duplicate responsibility) Less Inventory (as team works on focused set of features and tasks) Less Transportation (handoffs…
My post on DZone about Humble Architects sparked somewhat of a controversy, especially around my disparaging comments regarding Spring and Dependency Injection Frameworks. In this post, I expand on why I stopped using Spring. I was one of the earliest adopter of Spring in Norway. We developed a large system where we eventually had to start thinking about things like different mechanisms for reuse…
I’ve previously talked about the idea of shifting from estimates to budgets. The fundamental point of this article is that it’s more useful to control costs than to predict costs. The problem of this argument is whether it’s possible to develop software in that way. How will the relationship between the developer (or supplier organization) and the customer (or the customer…
Lean thinking describes seven classical sources of waste 無駄: Overproduction: Making stuff that nobody buys Over-processing: Creating stuff that is more fancy than what the customer wants Transport: Moving stuff from one place to another in order to create it or give it to a customer Motion: Expending unneeded effort while creating stuff Defects: Having to redo work because it wasn’t done…