This article describes a technique that I believe is missing from our practice, especially from teams working on complex (legacy) systems. The Problem I can’t refactor this code because I don’t know what happens in …
Practical Tips
Pragmatic Dependency Injection
Any non-trivial codebase out there benefits from Dependency Injection, for two main reasons: to be able to pass in a proxy or a decorated version of the target dependency, or a mock for unit testing …
Resurrection of the Coding Guidelines Document
I recently got a lot of ideas from the comments I got to a recent post on LinkedIN. The purpose of Code Review is learning, not blaming. But I won’t discuss code review nor pair …
The Clean Switch Rules
From all the syntax constructs of modern programming languages, the switch construct is the most prone to degenerate into an unmaintainable mess unless we take aggressive actions. This article introduces the rules to follow to …
Exception Handling Guide in Java
This article presents a pragmatic, clean approach to working with exceptions in the Java applications we build today.
The Best Code Review
This article tells the story of the best code review style I know of and discusses the key points you should focus on while reviewing code. By the nature of my activity, I get to …
Presenting Exceptions to Users
Many applications want to present the errors to their users in a nice human-readable form. This article covers some widely used best practices on this topic. Before we even start, let’s make it clear: NEVER …
Exceptions and Streams
Java 8 gave us Optional, a mighty weapon against the most frequent Exception in Java: NullPointerException, that I talked about in this blog post. However, Java 8 also brought new headaches regarding exceptions, as the …
Hide Checked Exceptions with SneakyThrows
Java is the only programming language in the world that has checked exceptions, which forces the caller to know about the individual exception types thrown by the called function. What do you do when you …
Avoiding NullPointerException
The terrible NullPointerException (NPE in short) is the most frequent Java exception occurring in production, acording to a 2016 study. In this article we’ll explore the main techniques to fight it: the self-validating model and …