Improve Java Skills By Going Old School

Want to Get Better at Java? Go Old School.

Rik Scarborough Articles, Java, Programming, Spring 1 Comment

So you’re a Java programmer, and you want to take your skills to a higher level. I’m going to suggest you take a project and go old school.

Over the course of this blog, I’ll explain what “going old school” means as well as give you some tips and tricks to get started. We’re going to step away from most modern tools and go back to the basics, so you gain a deeper understanding of what Java is and how it works. By the end, you should be well on your way to improving your Java skill set.

5 VS Code Extensions To Rocket Productivity

Ruben Hernandez Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming Leave a Comment

We all want to write cleaner and faster code. Better code. However, at the same time, we all learn at our own pace, and if you’re like me, discovering new strategies and methods to be more productive can take some time to adapt to and fully adopt. The quickest way I know to improve the coding process is to use effective tools to assist us. Even improving by just 1% is still an improvement!

I’ve assembled a quick unordered list of five great helpers that help me with organization and time and reduce my stress level as a developer. This list will be specific to extensions for VS Code (for the most part).

SQL Server Agent Jobs with Spring Batch

Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs with Spring Batch

Josh Green Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Modernization, Spring, Spring Batch, SQL, SQL Server Leave a Comment

In this blog post, I will demonstrate a technique to query the status of a SQL Server Agent job that executes the SSIS package. SQL Server Agent scripts are asynchronous in nature. This can make it difficult to make code decisions based on the execution status of a script of this type.

Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH extension

Remote Development With Visual Studio Code Remote – SSH

David Hoffmann Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming, Project Management, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Does your personal laptop struggle to keep up with your development needs? Maybe your company is looking for alternatives to continually needing to upgrade their developers’ laptops. Maybe a team of developers would benefit from a powerful remote server versus personal computers?

Today, remote development is even more streamlined than ever with the help of products like Visual Studio’s Remote – SSH extension or with Jetbrains Remote Development. In this blog post, I will give a brief overview of Visual Studio’s Remote – SSH extension and share a mini how-to on using it.

End-To-End Testing

Tips Learned From Years of Automated End-to-End Testing

Forrest Goyer Articles, Automation, Programming, Testing 1 Comment

Imagine for a moment that we’re getting ready to publish a new app or feature. Following the principles of Test Driven Development (like we always do), we have created a full suite of unit tests. We’re never pressed for time, so we’ve also built out full coverage integration and functional tests.

In order to ensure our front-end is behaving as expected, we’ll need to either manually step through the application or just push our commit to the main branch and let our continuous integration pipeline do the building and testing for us. But, if we wrote our end-to-end (E2E) tests without automation in mind, we might find the results lacking in usefulness…

This post isn’t a discussion on what E2E testing is nor a tutorial on how to get started. For that, resources like Smartbear, CircleCI, and Playwright have already published articles and tutorials that do a great job of covering that ground. In this post, we’ll talk through a few tips I’ve picked up over 5 years of championing fully automated end-to-end testing.