The Right Way to Run a Technical Interview

October 11, 2016

I’ve been through my fair share of technical interviews.  Typically, they’ll ask you to complete a live exercise, provide code samples, or answer mundane questions about a particular language or framework.  Generally, those approaches are useless.  Even the most talented software engineers do not always remember how to implement hashCode(), the differences between various search/sort algorithms, or […]

How to Find a Remote Job

October 1, 2016

Recently, I briefly went through a period of looking into next step options.  I’ve worked remotely for years and have no intentions of ever changing that!  We were blessed with an awesome opportunity that popped up, so the search is finally over.  But before I completely turn to the next page, I thought I’d throw out […]

Hibernate ORM, jOOQ, HikariCP, Transactions, and Spring: An SQL / CQRS Tutorial

July 2, 2016

When it comes to interacting with relational databases, citizens of the Java world tend to be in one of two camps.  Lately, the rift continues to widen. Use Hibernate ORM for all CRUD operations, all queries, and anything else that would otherwise touch SQL.  SQL is icky.  Abstract all the things. I got 99 problems and Hibernate ORM […]

Apache Camel: Processors Should NEVER Be Stateful

May 14, 2016

If you have experience with Apache Camel, this one might sound a little obvious.  But, it has recently come up a few times, so it’s worth mentioning. As an example, say you have a route that iterates over paged data and does something with it, and you therefore need to keep track of the pagination. […]

Why Systems Integration is Hard: Ashley, Bob, Cindy, Dave, Emily, Frank, Gina, and Hank

May 2, 2016

Imagine you manage a team of corporate event planners, responsible for overseeing each event and ensuring every single detail is arranged and executed.  Your team consists of 8 individuals.  The scale of each event is sufficiently large, requiring you to task each individual.  If any of them fail, the event will be unsatisfactory (at best) or […]