At Bringmeister, we strongly believe in the benefit of End-2-End tests. End-2-End tests give us the confidence that our system is working as in tended. Other than unit tests, they are black box tests running from outside against our deployed services. They are our final barrier before we deploy anything to production: if the End-2-End tests are green, we can hit the button.

If you have ever worked with an event bus like Kafka, Kinesis or ActiveMQ, I’m sure you saw some code like below. A method annotated as some kind of event-listener. Although every annotation is slightly different, the pattern is all the same. But how are those methods picked-up by Spring?

Over the last ten years, I worked with a lot of different database. I worked with traditional SQL databases such as DB2 and Oracle in a professional context. NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB have been my best friends during the last five years at Bringmeister. On side projects I also touched stuff like MongoDB. However, I never worked with a graph-database up till now. Time to change that with Neo4J!

Last year, I mentored our working student Steffen Scheller along his way to his Bachelor thesis. Steffen was part of Bringmeister for about a year when he decided to write his final academic paper with us. Together, we came up with an interesting topic:

Recently I stumbled across an interesting GitHub repository. It shows a way to mock Spring Data repositories for testing. The clue is, that the “mocks” are actual in-memory implementations based on Dynamic Proxies. No Docker, no H2, no Mockito.

I started blogging in May 2011 - more than 10 years ago! Back then, I had no experience with blogging, but I was interested in writing and creating content. So I gave it a try, bought a yearly subscription for some webspace (at https://www.netcup.de) and began to build my blog.

Three years ago, I wrote an article on how to test Spring’s @ConfigurationProperties classes. Since three years are a long time, I just updated the project on GitHub. It works with Spring 2.5.X now!

Our frontend team at Bringmeister uses GraphQL as one of their major tools when build our online shop. They’re using it to query different APIs and repositories to collect and gather all of their data.

In 2011, I wrote my Bachelor’s Thesis and about three years later in 2014 it was time for Master’s Thesis. I blogged a lot about both projects back then, but I never published the actual documents. The reason for that was that I wrote both thesis in cooperation with a company. My Bachelor’s Thesis has been a research project for IBM’s database development team (DB2 on z/OS) and my Master’s Thesis has been written for Informatica and their PIM team. So both documents have been under a blocking notice for a certain period of time. They have been confidential, if you want to say so. I wasn’t allowed to publish them.

Ich habe über die Weihnachtszeit mal wieder Schach gespielt - mehr schlecht als recht. Zusammen mit meinem Schwager bin ich auf Schacharena.de gelandet. Er hatte dort über viele Jahre Schach gespielt und nun also gegen mich.