I failed a Java 11 Certification exam

Some basics I got wrong

So here is the deal. I am Java 8 certified. I have 8 years of professional Java experience. Without studying, I tried a Java 11 Certification mock exam… and only got 44%. 😕 Here are 3 basic questions I got horribly wrong. I have collapsed the answers per topic, so please do try to answer the question before looking at the answer. Overloading order What is the output of the following code example? [Read More]

Jumping into Kotlin

Early impressions

Early, but not an adopter 8 years ago, I was doing my internship at Info Support, my current employer. During that time, I got invited to join the rest of the team to my first meetup, the Visug Event April 2013. The main speaker that evening was Hadi Hariri developer advocate at Jetbrains. Hadi gave 2 talks that evening. The first was about the Silver Bullet Syndrome. The other talk was about this new programming language Jetbrains was working on. [Read More]

Back to presenting!

Picking up the pace again.

Phew… it’s been a while… I haven’t posted a lot of content on the website recently, days just seem to go by so fast when they all look the same. I’ve been very busy lately with giving talks and presentations at different schools. Some Selenium here, some Cucumber there, Testcontainers and Pact, Kotlin… all the good stuff! Now that most of the school lectures are over, I am once again going to focus on giving some presentations at meetups and conferences. [Read More]

Getting through the Q&A section of your presentation

Don't fear the Q&A... Embrace it!

Imagine being at a conference or meetup giving a talk. You completely ace it (I believe you will, even if you don’t, you badass!) but then you feel anxiety setting in. You can feel it coming for you, slowly, surely: the end of your talk. Which means… it’s time for Q&A: Questions and (hopefully) your Answers. Q&A is the most dreaded part of a presentation for some while being indispensable for others. [Read More]

Great stuff is Loom-ing on the Horizon for Java

A short look at Project Loom

Almost two years ago now, I was at Oracle Code One in San Francisco. It was there that I first heard about Project Loom, a project that would introduce some kind of new way to do concurreny in Java. At that point, Loom was just a concept, a promise to make concurrency in Java easier. Fast forward to today and Loom has changed quite a bit since that initial presentation. The time to catch up with Project Loom. [Read More]
Loom  Java  JDK 

Building a Twitch Chat Integrated Game

STOMP that IRC

Being in Corona isolation, I have been watching some Twitch streams and was wondering if it would be something I’d like to do as well. I love teaching and since we’re all pretty much stuck in our homes, maybe I should give it a shot. It could be kind of like giving a talk at a conference only more limited in interaction… but that’s what I love most about teaching…interaction. [Read More]

Statically spilling your (Spring) Beans

Accessing Spring Beans from a static method

To make it abundantly clear: You should always try to refactor your code so you do not need this approach (something I’ll dive into in a follow up blogpost I’m working on). There may be some edge cases where there truly is no other way but those situations are rare. Always try to refactor! Using this method can lead to multiple unexpected and hard to debug issues as it does not follow the regular Spring Framework concepts. [Read More]

A plushy controlled game (Part 2)

Learning to fly with ml5.js and the Teachable Machine

This is part two of a series. Missed part 1? Read it here! What are we building? What do you get when you mix physics and computer vision? A demo concept “game” controlled by a plush animal! So fluffy! <3 In the first post we covered the basic elements of a game. We drew items on a canvas and programmed in some physics so our big friend can jump! [Read More]

A plushy controlled game (Part 1)

A journey into p5.js

I have been fascinated by video games ever since I saw the first level of Mario. They dominated a big part of my youth and are what got me into programming in the first place. Building a website for our Call of Duty clan was probably one of the first times I can into contact with HTML and CSS. Recently however, my fascination has shifted from playing games, to discovering how they are built. [Read More]

'Just Google It' is not enough

The negative impact of 3 simple words

When I had just transitioned into a senior role a couple of years ago, a junior developer in my team asked me a technical question. I was busy tackling a pretty important issue which required my full attention so I didn’t give him the time he deserved. Basically what I answered him was: “Just Google It…” Fast forward a couple of months. I am scrolling through Twitter and see an interesting discussion. [Read More]