Don’t fall into the bottomless pit of perfection — I occasionally hear the quote, ‘If civilization were built by programmers, one strong wind would blow it over.’ My reply is usually to remind the quoter that humans have thousands of years of experience building civilizations, but programmers have less than a hundred. As programmers, we are still learning the…

Easy logging for your Kubernetes cluster — I’m a real log geek; I love watching logs scroll by as my services run. So I was very happy to learn that Microk8s has an observability stack built-in. But it still requires some set-up and finessing, which I will review in this article. To follow along, you should have…

Testing functional applications with Mockito — I’ve always been a fan of unit testing, though some of that has faded as I mostly make simple RESTful services. The best way to test simple services is to run them, especially in this age of CI/CD. But there are still occasions when unit tests shine. I have also…

Automation and Traceability With Separation of Concerns Part of the battle against complexity is ‘divide and conquer.’ Separating out portions of a process with limited connections can lead to easier development and comprehension. One separation that is relatively easy to identify and implement is partitioning application code and deployment description…

Share data seamlessly across instances — When I was first introduced to stateless services, I had difficulty getting past the “where’s the beef?” thinking. What good is a service that can’t remember anything from request to request? I gradually began to understand that the trick to stateless services is all states must be persisted after every…

Why not both? — There are lots of reasons that people argue for microservices. But the monolith has one big reason…simplicity. One service that does it all, only one set of source code. The boilerplate associated with a service doesn’t have to be duplicated. And sharing code isn’t a problem. My previous article on…

Using Spring Boot Sleuth to overcome reactive Java’s thread free-for-all — In a previous article, I was able to overcome reactive Java’s problem with maintaining context on a per-thread basis. The main issue is that reactive Java requests can be handled by different threads, so we can’t rely on the popular MDC facility of Java logging. The strategy I came up…

How not to look like a noob. — Reactive Java has been around for almost a decade now but I still see people that are struggling with it and, even worse, abusing it. So I thought I’d jot down the kinds of things I never want to see in a pull request. 1. Blocking This should be obvious. It’s supposed…

Java microservices without Docker Desktop on macOS — If you haven’t heard by now, Docker Desktop will charge a subscription fee for companies with more than 250 employees or more than 10 million dollars in revenue. It’s not a huge fee, and if your company is already using Docker Hub private repositories, I believe you’re covered. But it…