GeeCon has arrived! Day one

GeeCon 2017 is finally here!. Packed with presentations, ranging from higher management talking about how organisations work in a big picture to a "geeky" CPU internals. Everything in a Multikino, providing what's needed for a presenter (and attendees) spiced up with a really good catering. 

Here's my very short report on what I saw today.

Keynote - David Moore

A very interesting presentation, especially taking into account that usually higher management talks are a bit.. boring (so to speak ;-) ). He talked about approaching refactoring / replatforming on an organisational level. Most of his observations were exactly aligned with my experiences, both concerning things that work and things that don't.
What is worth remembering is Convay's law - "products mirrors organisations". Tech organisation with bad communication or bad structure will always create lousy products. Period! Leaders of any sort should also take with themselves the statement that their role is usually to hire great people, trust them, let them loose and get the hell out of the way ;-)

Caching - Michael Plod 

General introduction to caching in typical business web applications, that is applications that can't allow "eventual consistency". Some basic concepts (local cache, clustered, distributed, local off-heap), some examples, some real-world cases (issues). Overally, nice presentation from both technical (way the presentation was delivered) and meritorious point of view. Some (salut, Grzegorz!) would say that nothing new / leading edge was presented, but in my opinion it was worth attending anyways. Perhaps the title - "best practices and gotchas" suggested something different, that is much more detailed, technical presentation? I personally especially liked that whole speech was focused around what basic questions should be asked when introducing a cache into a system and how these should be answered, step by step.

Last but not least - quoting the Author, remember that a cache will not solve performance issues of an application - first optimise, than introduce local cache, then eventually a distributed one (to tackle scalability issues etc.). And never ever implement your own cache! :-)

Domain Driven Design - Cyrille Martaire

Brief introduction to DDD, mixed with funny cats and some jokes (5 minutes into presentation - we're done, thank you!). Basic concepts (ubiquitous language, Value Objects, Bounded Context). Some examples to help the audience visualise the ideas behind DDD. From my perspective the presentation lacked a clear example, comparing small application (MVP) written with and without DDD. Such exercise would be very helpful to see a value that can be brought by introducing DDD and which problems can be solved. Then it would be much easier to decide if benefits outweigh additional costs.

How SCRUM moved away from developers - Matthew Brylka

By reading a title - and just a title - I understood that the presentation will be a critic of SCRUM implementations in many companies, where the process no longer helps deliver value but s rather a good excuse for added paperwork loved by all sorts of bureaucrats. What I got instead was mostly overview of SCRUM principles (with some emphasis on what is not there) along with particularly interesting "how to succeed" section. Two thoughts from the presentation to be remembered:

• Use agreements with stakeholders instead of contracts / demands
• Technical excellence, debt backlog and refactoring are constant practice - every manager should understand this, instead of pushing refactoring further, deprioritising it or asking for a separate, estimated task (that could be saved in the backlog forever)

After this presentation I got an impression that besides developers also line managers and allmighty architects of all sorts should attend the GeeCon conference! ;-)

Developer Plantations - Wojciech Seliga

Writing code (aka "coding") is becoming a commodity. Soon everyone after few months of training will be able to write *something*, just as now literacy is common compared to XIX century. In order to stay ahead of the crowd, we (meaning - skilled engineers) need to understand why is a product created, besides knowing how and what it is. These are main thesis for the future of our industry. A bit of a "lifestyle" presentation, without any technical aspects. Worth listening to just for a glimpse of a different perspective (different than another tool, library or architecture).

To sum up - an interesting day. On day two I plan to attend some more "technical" presentations. Stay tuned!

Spice up your Java with Lombok

Verbosity of Java language has been discussed for years. Almost since inception developers keen on clean and concise code were complaining about writing resource management code (lengthy if-try-catch with JDBC) or creating getters/mutators in Java beans. Simply put, Java language forces devs to write lots of boilerplate code. Some most painful spots are being addressed by language enhancements, like Automatic Resource Management (ARM) in Java 7. Yet this process is complex, cumbersome and takes time.
Is there any better (faster) relieve then? It seems there is! Presenting Project Lombok. Nice utility to speed-up development using source-code annotations. Some most useful features are as follows:

• @Getter/@Setter - simply annotate any field to have appropriate method generated. What's more, getter can be "lazy" without any explicit locking code.
• @Cleanup - ARM is here, no need to wait for version 7 release.
• @NoArgsConstructor, @RequiredArgsConstructor, @AllArgsConstructor - used along with @NotNull instruct Lombok to generate appropriate constructors with arguments checking. Beautiful :)

Full list can be found here.

To entice you more, just take a look at following example:

@RequiredArgsConstructor(staticName = "of")
@AllArgsConstructor
public class Bean {

    @NotNull @Getter private String name;
    @Getter @Setter private String value;
    @Getter @Setter private int count; 
}

Isn't that appealing? ;-)

Shrink your JAR

Releasing your small project / library into public? Think about shrinking it beforehand - it's always nice to save some bandwidth if possible. There is nice (free!) tool for this purpose - ProGuard. Results, as published on the web, are quite encouraging. For example Apache Ant went down to 242K from 2.4M and that's staggering 90%.
What's more, ProGuard can do more that mere shrinking. Dead code listing (optimization) and obfuscation all come bundled.
To sum up, one quick run of this handy tool can make your release smaller and less prone to reverse-engineering. Give it a try!