Online Courses for Developers - A slightly more Critical View

Online Courses for Developers - A slightly more Critical View

We have a massive skills shortage in IT, especially in development. A natural effect of this is that there are many career changers and, as a result, alternative educational opportunities. These alternatives, mostly YouTube video courses and other online offerings, are good knowledge brokers but have downsides. Especially in such a knowledge-driven environment, scientific methods are more important than entertaining course design.

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Hiring Devs - Why you should consider Juniors

Hiring Devs - Why you should consider Juniors

When it comes to developer maturity, I heard many tech recruiters and decision-makers saying: “We should only hire senior devs.” This may be justified in some situations, projects, or teams, but I do not accept this statement as a general premise. In this blog post, I want to highlight the benefits that juniors can bring to the team and encourage you to find and foster new talent actively.

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Why you probably don't need Spring Cloud Config

Why you probably don't need Spring Cloud Config

Spring cloud config is a configuration management solution and part of the Spring ecosystem. It’s easy to integrate and use, but it has severe downsides from an architectural perspective. Also, I have seen many projects where it was added just because “it is a thing” and even more often, it was used to solve or work around problems in the software architecture or deployment for which it doesn’t provide a real solution. In this blog post, I’ll point out some conceptional issues and downsides of that project I have seen so far.

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Hiring Devs - The Seniority Paradox

Hiring Devs - The Seniority Paradox

In IT, there is a paradox when it comes to job titles. Somewhere along the way, the practice of linking job titles to a candidate’s (desired) experience became established in large parts of the market. This then created the now famous and omnipresent job titles like “Senior Software Engineer”, “Professional DevOps Engineer”, etc. In this blog post, I would like to explain the paradox around these designations and how I use them in the course of the talent search…

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Blog Relaunch (Yes, again)

Blog Relaunch (Yes, again)

I noticed that I write not as often as I want to, so I procrastinated and first relaunched my blog instead of writing. It has a new design and some new functionality, also the posts have now images. The relaunch was, for me, some kind of personal retrospective, where I read all my old posts and found out that I’m probably a better webmaster than a writer…

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Why complexity in software projects is bad (and you should not advertise it)

Why complexity in software projects is bad (and you should not advertise it)

There are (still) many people telling proudly, how complex their product is. There are job ads, explaining that you will “create highly complex software”. These false signals, which I personally saw in many positions and projects, create a potentially huge long-tail problem, not primarily for engineers, but for the product management and engineering team lead. In this blogpost, I want to point out some of those impacts of advertising complexity…

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The Spring Security Oauth2 Blues - Simplicity

The Spring Security Oauth2 Blues - Simplicity

I personally like the Spring Framework and its security components, because it’s pretty full-featured and easy to use, but when it comes to Spring Security OAuth2, there’s a huge quality breakdown. In this (probably series) of blogposts, I’ll try to sum up the good, the bad, the evil and why I ended up completely dropping Spring Security OAuth2.

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Java Libs in Scala - A bit more Functional

Java Libs in Scala - A bit more Functional

Every Java library can be used in Scala, which is, for me, one of the good parts of the JVM world. But Java libs are mostly object-oriented and not functional, therefore full of side effects and somtimes “ugly” to use in Scala. But there are some approaches how to make Java libs (or their interfaces) more functional, so they can almost be used like a Scala lib.

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