Szymon Stępniak

GR8Conf EU 2019 starts precisely in 13 days (on May 27th). Each year Copenhagen becomes a heart of Groovy vibrant community for 3 days. The conference offers both talks and workshops, focused on Groovy related topics such as upcoming Groovy 3 release, building DSLs, using Micronaut in the cloud-native environment, or testing applications with Spock and Geb, to name a few. And that’s not even a quarter of great stuff you can expect from it. This year you can also attend one of my three talks I’m going to deliver.

"Geniuses still make mistakes and having brilliant ideas and elite programming skills don’t guarantee that your software will be a hit. What’s going to make or break your career is how well you collaborate with others", say Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman in their book "Debugging Teams. Better productivity through collaboration". It shows that crafting the ability to collaborate is equally important as learning new programming languages and mastering the ones we already know. Let’s take a quick look at how this book can help us to become a better team player and a better team leader.

Spock Framework executes test methods (features) in a single class (specification) in the declaration order. There is nothing wrong in this default behavior - we should write tests with their isolation in mind. However, in some cases, we would like to randomize test methods execution. Today we are going to learn how to do it.

In this short blog post, I would like to show you how to set a heap size of the application executed from the native image generated with GraalVM. We will also take a quick look at the effects caused the maximum heap size change.

Ratpack is an excellent tool for building RESTful^[1] applications. However, to benefit most of it, we need to know the tool a little bit better. It applies to Ratpack handler’s mechanism - it is much different compared to what we have learned by using many popular MVC frameworks. In today’s blog post I would like to show you a relatively simple example that confused many newcomers.

There are books you read once, and you don’t plan to read them back again any time soon. However, some books are so influential and valuable that when you decide to study them the second time, you realize that it was the right choice, and you could make this call a few years earlier. Today I would like to show you a book that belongs to this second group — no doubts about that.

I love SDKMAN!. It made using multiple different Java distributions in a single operating system much more comfortable. You can install Java across different versions (from 6 to 13.EA) and different vendors (OpenJDK, Oracle, Zulu, Corretto or GraalVM CE to name a few). Switching between those versions is as simple as executing a single sdk use java {version} command and you are ready to use whatever Java you want. However, not all Java versions are available by default, but luckily, SDKMAN! has a simple solution to this problem.

I’ve never enjoyed working with regular expressions in Java. It was always very error-prone. You had to remember to escape backslashes, and a very simple match elements check required writing at least 5 lines of code. Booooring. However, Groovy solved most of these issues, and today we are going to take a closer look at features like pattern operator, find operator or exact match operator. We will focus on learning the new syntax, as well as measuring and comparing its performance. Let’s begin!

Today I’ve decided to improve my Github account settings a bit. I thought that it would be nice to add GPG key to it and sign all commits pushed from my computer. Everything worked great until I tried to commit the first change directly from my IntelliJ IDEA.

We are software developers. Our daily duty is to write programs. We spend a lot of time and effort into doing the right things and doing them right. At some point, the production launch day comes and depending on our level of confidence - we are calm and ready for the first wave of unpredictable users, or deadly terrified.