Software Engineering

Management Lessons From Hard Knocks

Here are some of the lessons that I picked up from over a decade of watching Hard Knocks.

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Creating Web Integration Tests for Spring Boot REST Controller

I’ve been working on a simple REST API for a CRUD backend application using Spring Boot. Nothing revolutionary, but it’s simply a new way of writing less code that I haven’t tried before.

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United Colours of File Systems

This weekend I needed to access some external hard drive folders on a Windows laptop. We follow a united colours approach to our systems at home, which, just like in the real world comes with a big set of advantages and occasional challenges. One of the downsides is the fact that each operating system uses different file systems.

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Creating a Municipality Map of Portugal With Raphael.js

Last year I found out about a rule in the Portuguese tax code that allows local councils to give back a small percentage of the taxes to be collected back to their residents. This was seen as a measure to incentivize people to move or stay in poorer regions, which probably suffer from a shortage of jobs and services. This was a common practice in medieval times, with incentives as big as a more lax treatment in possible crimes among them. Of course back then the risk of an Eastern invasion by a Spanish monarch was very much in the day-to-day thinking of our rulers. One can speculate that if in 2018 all the Portuguese people live by the coast is the East still Portugal? I suppose if enough Irish speakers moved there it could be claimed as part of Ireland! But I diverge.

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