It’s not a coincidence that these plugins have synonymous names; both are dedicated to running tests. The key difference is in which part of the maven build lifecycle each one will run. The default maven build lifecycle consists of the following phases: validate: validate the project is correct, and all…

The Puzzle (Part 1) Imagine you have a bag containing multiple red, green, or blue cubes. You play a series of games where, in each game, an Elf shows you a few combinations of these colored cubes taken from the bag. In each game, the Elf will take out some cubes, show them to…

I enjoy visiting the Kotlin subreddit to keep up with the community’s pulse. And every now and then, questions arise that, while straightforward to the experienced, often spark intrigue among beginners. One recent post was no exception. u/EL7OSSAM was intrigued. “If arrays are of fixed length, how could you simply…

In this article, we explore the complexities of handling transactions across Kafka and relational databases in Spring Boot applications. The traditional approach, using ChainedKafkaTransactionManager, has been deprecated in 2021. But worry not, the solution is elegantly simple thanks to the guidance from Gary Russell, the leading contributor to the Spring…

This article is also available as a YouTube video. Watch it here. I began my last story and first one of this series by mentioning that as a backend developer, I've been distant from frontend technologies for a long time since I was at university playing with HTML, CSS, and…

This story is also available as a YouTube video. Check it out here! I’ve spent my entire career, from university through many years in the field focusing solely on backend technologies. Recently, things changed when I began building apps with Flutter. …

The open-source community and giant cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Azure have always had a complex relationship. One of the most compelling stories that highlight this tension is the saga between Redis Labs and these tech giants. The Genesis of Redis Before diving into the complexities, it’s…

This story is part of a series. Previously: Going Functional With Kotlin — Part 1: What is functional programming? As we continue our journey into the world of functional programming in Kotlin, it’s time to tackle a concept that may sound imposing but is fundamentally intuitive: the higher-order function. In…

Starting your journey into investments and the world of finance can be both exciting and a bit confusing. Maybe you’ve heard about bonds, but what are they, really? Why do people buy them, and what makes them different from other things you can invest in? This is where my personal…