SivaLabs

What I Learned This Week

• If you are thinking of what is a better way to structure your code, then I highly recommend watching Facts and Myths about CQRS • Oskar Dudycz • Devoxx Poland 2023 talk.
• I have updated my blog to make it easy to read posts and optimized CSS/JS to make it a bit faster. Along the way, I learned some new features of Hugo such as including Table of Contents, opening external links in a new tab, etc.
• Spring Boot Tutorials for the Impatient: I have planned to write concise and to the point tutorials on the latest Spring Boot version. I have published Getting Started with Spring Boot article, which is the first tutorial in the series. So, stay tuned!!
• Published Testing REST API integrations using WireMock and Testcontainers guide.
• I have published Creating a Blog using Hugo, Asciidoc, and Netlify article which you can follow to create your blog with ABSOLUTELY ZERO COST.
• AtomicJar team announced Testcontainers desktop app to make local development simpler using Testcontainers. Check it out.

A happy moment

One of my YouTube channel subscribers pinged me and said he was looking for Job change, and my Top 5 Tips to succeed in Technical Interviews helped him a lot. That made me feel the time and effort of making videos is worth it 😄

Introducing Spring Boot

Spring Boot is the most popular framework for building applications in the Java world. Spring Boot is an Opinionated and Convention Over Configuration based approach to building Spring framework based applications.

Using Spring Boot, you can build different kinds of applications such as monolithic applications, microservices, serverless applications, Batch applications, etc.

In this tutorial, I will explain the process for setting up a blog using the static site generator Hugo, writing content using Markdown and Asciidoctor, and deploy on Netlify.

What I Learned This Week

• I have published Tomato Architecture - A Pragmatic Approach to Software Design article sharing my thoughts around how to build an application without over-engineering it.
• I have shared My Thoughts on DevOps, Platform Engineering, and FullStack Developer talking about the challenges of being a Fullstack Developer.
• Published a video on Testing AWS Service Integrations using LocalStack and Testcontainers
• Tom Hombergs published the 2nd Edition of Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture: Build ‘clean’ applications with code examples in Java book which I highly recommend to read.
• If you are working on Go projects, then the Air tool comes really handy to have Live Reload upon code changes. You can see an example application.
• In recent years, a common approach being followed is building backend API and frontend as SPA separately. In some cases, though they are built as separate applications, they are bundled as single deployable using frontend-maven-plugin. Then I came across Quinoa - A Quarkus extension to create Modern UI with no hassle. Looks very interesting to me.
• Spring 6.1 is introducing RestClient as an alternative to RestTemplate which provides the fluent API similar to Reactive WebClient. Read this announcement for more info.

Keep learning. Cheers.

In the software development world, once in a while a new ideology or process or technology will be introduced. And, the whole developer community goes crazy on that shiny new stuff. A decade ago it was Agile/Scrum, then DevOps, then SRE and now Platform Engineering.

Somehow, I got curious about what is all the fuss about Platform engineering and read a bit about it, and I felt “Oh, people realized that DevOps is a good idea but impractical, and they are correcting it now”.

After a couple of years into software development, I wanted to improve my skills by learning more about Software Architecture and Design.

SivaLabs Weekly Newsletter - 2023 Week 27

• I came to know about T3 App which claims to be “The best way to start a full-stack, typesafe Next.js app”
• Also, came across PocketBase which is “Open Source backend for your next SaaS and Mobile app in 1 file”
• Switched from iTerm2 to warp Terminal, and I am liking it very much.
• I have written Sharing Thoughts and Knowledge via Twitter vs Blogging article.
• Published a new blog post Running Testcontainers tests using GitHub Actions and Testcontainers Cloud. Try it out by creating a Free Testcontainers Cloud account.
• If you want to master testing Spring Boot applications and prefer reading a book over watching videos, then I highly recommend Testing Spring Boot Applications Demystified
• Though I said “I decided Go is not my cup of tea and decided to move on” in My Plans for 2023, for some reason I needed to brush up my Go skills. As part of that, I have implemented a small app using Go, Gin, Pgx, Zap, Viper and Testcontainers.
• Published a video on Getting Started with Testcontainers for Go
• I am not using Chat GPT much myself. I am interested to see how we can use it, so gonna watch Building Java Stuff with ChatGPT - Episode 1

Keep learning. Cheers.

SocialMedia is a double-edged sword. We can put it to good use or become addicted to it and suffer. The challenge is, it is hard to know when it became addiction. Most of the time we get to know that we are addicted to it once we started suffering.

While building software, once in a while we face some weird issue which is supposed to just work fine according to our understanding, but it is not working, and we don’t have any clue.

I’m a happy Lombok library user. I found this library a decade ago, and I’ve been using it ever since. I don’t remember facing any major problems with it so far.

However, I see a few people that I greatly admire and learn from often complain that Lombok is very bad, and you should avoid it. Obviously, I am curious to know what am I missing? I know a couple of scenarios where using Lombok brings some challenges. Apart from it, I really enjoy using the Lombok library.