Category Personal

Just a short one, trying to re-start my posting habit.

I changed my approach to learning Java, now I understand most of the basic concepts: I am not going to fully finish my Udemy training anymore, but instead doing much more learning by example.

Did I make progress? I think so:

• I started with understanding Spring, Spring Boot, Spring web starter and Spring security
• I finally understand Maven and have added some libraries to my sample projects
• I have a vague idea of a case program I want to build in the geographic domain. So I started with integration of the Java Topology Suite(JTS) in my project and started experimentation

OK, enough for now. Let’s see if I can keep doing Java, as the very busy month of August has started again…

Yes, shame on me. It has been almost 2 months since my last post. Did I quit my challenge? No that is certainly not the case. But I have to say that motivation has not always been there to make big steps.

Last time I was halfway the monster chapter on Sets. At this moment I still have not finished this chapter. Just the sorted collections and a long challenge to go. The topic in itself is not specifically complex or difficult, but I want to do it well. This means that I need time and ‘brainspace’ available to start on the many video’s and challenges. I have been lacking in this department obviously.

Most important reason I spend less time on the training, is because of my nights. Curious 🤨 ?

Read More

The other day I was talking about my Java challenge with one of the (sr) Java developers in my team. I told him that I was currently learning topics like Java Generics and Access Modifiers. His reaction caused me some concern.

He explained that these indeed are topics that Java developers learn and know, but in practice you do not really “use” them. In the daily work you mostly implement known design patterns, which you bootstrap with more or less stand Java coding blocks. And most of the time standard libraries like Spring(-Boot) also take away complexity from using Java standard functionality.

So, should I stop learning the details of Java and more focus on general Java, design patterns and Spring?

Read More

As you can read in my bio (see About me), I have been trained as a Software Engineer many years ago, somewhere in the mid 1990’s. After a few years programming, I drifted away to analysis, project- and program management and several Agile roles like Release Train Engineer and Scrum Master. Meanwhile I kept involved with technology, but I did not code regularly anymore.

Now that I am coding almost every day for my Java course, I realise that also the brains have some “muscle memory”. Interested to see what I mean by this?

Read More

Welcome to my new blog. This is the first post! As the title shows, it is about my challenge to learn a new programming language, Java! In fact, I have 3 challenges here:

1. Learning Java programming language, including standard modules like Spring and some design patterns
2. Learn about the technology and processes of building, testing and hosting (Java) software. This includes trying to get a CI/CD pipeline up and running (probably using Jenkins)
3. Learning how to write an interesting blog at regular intervals. Never done that before as well.

I was inspired and motivated to do this by the Covid lockdowns (never waste a good crisis) and the new focus on R&D , Learning and Self Development at my job. Well, for the Java part I found a good course (more on that in a next post), but for the rest I suppose I just start and go along from there

In this blog I will keep you, and everybody else who is interested, informed on my challenge to learn the Java programming language. Check the About Me and My Technology sections to learn more on the “why and what”