Posted by Joep Weijers on March 26, 2024
Last week, a delegation from the Platform Layer of our Development department attended the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon in Paris. The hundreds of sessions, loads of vendor booths and thousands of attendees provide great ways to catch up to the latest and greatest in the Cloud Native space. Here are four interesting topics that we learned about this KubeCon.
Read morePosted by Joep Weijers on February 6, 2024
To stay on top of the latest developments and best practices in Azure, TOPdesk joined the ISV Innovation Days at Microsoft. During two days our Cloud Architects and Operations team worked together with Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Architects to create proof of concepts of ways that TOPdesk can better benefit from Azure.
Read morePosted by Joep Weijers on September 12, 2023
TOPdesk provides each developer a budget and time to broaden and deepen their knowledge. I recommend to invest such a budget into visiting a conference in person.
In an industry that is changing as fast as the software industry, it is imperative to keep your knowledge up to date. A conference is one of the tools to stay informed on what is happening in the industry. Other examples include reading blogs, following industry leaders on Twitter, or listening to podcasts. A conference bundles a year worth of innovations and best practices and offers then in a one or multi day package.
Read morePosted by Joep Weijers on April 26, 2023
In our software, we have transitive dependencies on code from Java’s Enterprise Edition (JavaEE). The code is typically in javax.* packages. The owner of Java, Oracle, opensourced the JavaEE specification and has donated it to the Eclipse foundation. This however came with one very impacting condition: that the trademarked Java name is no longer used in the specifications. The specification rename to JakartaEE was pretty easy. Renaming all the packages to jakarta.* was not. This means that all code depending on JakartaEE has to be updated to use the new packages. Although some libraries manage to handle both javax.* and jakarta.* packages at the same time, you really only want to have only one of them. That also means that all libraries that you use have to be updated to use jakarta.* packages before you can successfully update your own code. Here is how we did it:
Posted by Joep Weijers on January 21, 2022
After updating to Maven 3.8.3, we have several warnings regarding the relocation of artifacts in our Maven builds. See for example the output of using Maven’s dependency plugin to analyze the dependency usage of an empty Maven project:
$ mvn dependency:analyze [INFO] --- maven-dependency-plugin:2.8:analyze (default-cli) @ relocation-messages --- [WARNING] The artifact xml-apis:xml-apis:jar:2.0.2 has been relocated to xml-apis:xml-apis:jar:1.0.b2 [INFO] No dependency problems found
Posted by Joep Weijers on March 5, 2021
The most important phase in the lifecycle of software, is the final one: the end-of-life. My apekooi project the Online Watercoolerchat will reach end-of-life on the 16th of March 2021. Read on about the project and why you want to eventually get rid of your code.
Read morePosted by Joep Weijers on November 26, 2020
At TOPdesk we run many Java services in our Service Architecture. We use the AdoptopenJDK OpenJ9 JRE as base image for our services running in Kubernetes. In this post we will find out how to get a Java Heap Dump from a Java application running on OpenJ9 JRE.
A Java Heap Dump is a snapshot of all the objects that are in memory in the JVM at a certain moment. Typically, a heap dump is created at the moment a Java application crashes because it runs out of memory. The heap dump can then show you what the application was doing in its dying moments, providing insight into potential memory leaks.
Posted by Joep Weijers on February 14, 2020
You may have a loud voice, but if you are addressing a group with more than twenty people, you will want some form of amplification. In this third and final installment of the technical aspects of public speaking, we will discuss how your audience can hear you properly using microphones.
Posted by Joep Weijers on February 7, 2020
Your presentation starts in a few minutes. It is your time to shine. You plug in your laptop and nothing happens. No slides on the big screen behind you. An already stressful moment becomes even more stressed. You’re starting to lose your audience.
Nobody wants to be in this situation. Here are some tips to make getting on stage a smooth process, even if unexpected events occur.
Posted by Joep Weijers on January 29, 2020
Public speaking can be pretty stressful. All eyes will be on you and the last thing you wish to happen is a problem with your slides or microphone. A flawless presentation requires proper preparation. We have gathered some best practices, drawn from practical experience, to help you prepare your presentation. With these tips and tricks you will confidently walk on-stage, knowing that slides and sound will not hamper your presentation.
Posted by Joep Weijers on February 5, 2019
In an ignite talk, a speaker has 20 slides to present a topic to you. The slides automatically advance every 15 seconds, so they have exactly 5 minutes to get their point across. Topics typically include quick pitches of software tools, methodologies, but fun topics are also game: I’ve seen a speed course Dutch, and a talk about coffee.
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Posted by Joep Weijers on November 8, 2018
Imagine you are a developer and you have just pushed a change that breaks the build. The Continuous Integration system, Jenkins in our case, sends you an email to notify you about this failure. BORING! Here are six examples that you can use to spice up your alerting and motivate your Development and Operations teams to react to alerts faster.
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Posted by Joep Weijers on October 11, 2017
At TOPdesk our Development department is working closely together with our Operations department. This collaboration started off a bit rough, but through several initiatives this was smoothed out. In this post I’d like to show how we used Deployment Pipelines to break down the wall between Development and Operations.
Posted by Joep Weijers on March 15, 2017
The whole software world is backed by Version Control Systems, providing history and traceability to code changes. But you don’t have to restrict its usage to code. Read on to learn how TOPdesk enjoys the benefits of a VCS by employing it in 5 alternative ways.
You want your documentation to live as close as possible to the code it describes. Putting your documentation right next to the code in a VCS allows you to keep both up to date. People who work with a certain revision are automatically presented with the relevant documentation for that version.
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