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?

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Another update. After a week with little time, I finally had the time to finish the final Object Oriented Programming chapter. Including the challenges and the exercises. Feels like a real milestone, as mastering OOP concepts is in my opinion really one of the basics of designing good programs. Now terms like Inheritance, Polymorphism, Encapsulation and Composition have little secrets for me.

Let’s go back to the course itself: the final challenge (explained in a video) was exactly the same as the final exercise. Makes the exercise a little less valuable unfortunately. Anyway, I have been creating Basic Hamburgers, Healthy burgers and Deluxe burgers. That was fun to do, but I really think that the trainer, even with the limited knowledge we students have at this time, did not get everything out of his solution. I liked mine better (maybe think all programmers think that about their code?). Let me explain.

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OK, I am now half way Chapter Seven (of Twenty Five), learning about Object Composition and Encapsulation. Probably still basic stuff for experienced OO programmers.

Anyway, in this course there are two types of “hands on the keyboard” exercises in the chapters:

• Challenges. These are explained in a video. Then you have to pause the video and create your code. The remainder of the video the trainer showing his implementation of the challenge
• Coding Exercises are different. In this case you make and test your code in IntelliJ, then you copy your coded classes to the course website. The website runs your code and checks if results are as specified in the assignment

Now I have done quite a few of both, I like the Coding Exercises better than the Challenges. Why?

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There are several ways to learn a programming language. If done as part of education or job, you will probably go to a professional training. With a group of (mostly) motivated participants in face2face full day training sessions for several weeks or months.

From the start it was clear this wasn’t the way to go for me. Programming in Java is not my job, so I will do it mainly in my own time, when social life permits. I really need to chew the monster in little parts. Considering this, for me two main options remained:

1. Make my own course collecting tutorials and primers available online
2. Follow an online commercial “Java start-to-end” course

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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”