SivaLabs

If you ever worked on a large project which doesn’t have any tests then you know how painful it is to work on such codebase. You know what is more painful? Working on a project which has plenty of USELESS tests written for the sake of passing minimum code coverage requirement. Being a Professional Software Developer means more than solving a problem. One needs to learn how to write maintainable and testable code, write meaningful tests, know what to test and what not to test, how to evolve the codebase backing with a good set of test suite.

I was working on a SpringBoot application which is planned to deploy on AWS and, we were using S3, SQS and RDS services. LocalStack provides an easy-to-use test/mocking framework for developing AWS based Cloud applications. I want to use Localstack mock services instead of using real AWS services for two purposes: To run integration tests To run application locally We can use Testcontainers to spin up a Localstack docker container, but we need to configure Amazon service clients like AmazonS3, AmazonSQSAsync which is typical boilerplate that we copy-paste from project to project.

Nowadays software development is a challenging task as the number of programming languages, frameworks, libraries are increasing rapidly day by day. Luckily, the number of resources to learn on the internet for free also increased a lot. There are a ton of free resources to learn almost everything on the internet. There are lots of official documentation, blog posts, Udemy courses, YouTube videos etc. As a backend developer who primarily work on JVM based languages/frameworks like Java, Kotlin, SpringBoot etc, following are a collection of resources I usually follow to learn new things.

Gone are the days we can call ourselves as Java developer, .NET developer, Python developer etc. Nowadays we might need to work with multiple languages to some extent such as Python for scripting, Go for CLI utilities etc. Out of personal interest I started learning Go Language 3 months ago and I am using Go for our current application. In this article I would like to share my first impression on Go language.

As software developers, most of us implicitly assume gaining strong technical skills might make us successful. Many of us assume being good at cutting edge technologies, mastering keyboard shortcuts, being able to work on front-end, back-end and infrastructure etc etc will make us successful in our careers. Yes, the above mentioned skills definitely help, but just being good at tech skills might not make us successful. There is more to it.

We all know how to run SpringBoot application in debug mode from our favorite IDEs(Eclipse/IntellijIDEA etc) and debug the code. Recently I had to debug a SpringBoot application which is running on a remote server. There is already lot of information on the Internet on how to remote debug java applications, but some approaches didn’t work for me. So, here I would like to share my findings. If application is running on localhost Suppose you are running your application on localhost only and remote debug from your IDE.

It’s been tough time for everyone due to the Corona virus situation. Staying at home for weeks and weeks is not easy, but it is very necessary thing to do so that we don’t spread the virus. However, if I look on the bright side I used to spend minimum 3 hours for office commute everyday. Now I am using that time for various other activities including learning some new things.

While building the software, we all agree, as a team, to follow a set of guidelines which are typically considered as best practices. But during the development, developers might violate those guidelines unknowingly or ignorance. Typically, we rely upon code reviews or code quality checking tools like SonarQube, PMD, etc. to check for such violations. But some of the guidelines could be opinionated decisions which might not be able to automate using SonarQube, PMD etc.

I come across many blog posts from various sources like Twitter, StackOverflow etc and some of them are very helpful. Also, in day to day work I learn few new things, explore some new tools. Usually I keep track of this information using Browser Bookmarks and Pocket. I thought may be this information could be useful for others too. So, I am going to share it weekly on my blog.

One of the many reasons for huge popularity of Spring and SpringBoot is it’s great support for Testing. We can write unit tests using Mockito without requiring any Spring features. And, we can write Integration Tests using Spring testing support by creating Spring ApplicationContext. Read Guide to Testing SpringBoot Applications While running integration tests we might need to interact with external services like relational databases, NoSQL datastores, Kafka etc. We can spin up those external services as Docker containers and run tests against them.