My Logging Best Practices

If you are a backend developer like me, logging is the window to your application. Unlike in the frontend, there’s not much to see except from some logging messages. Here are some of my personal guidelines I use when I write logs. Log after, not before Back in the days, a logbook was written on […]

Idempotent events with revision numbers

In an event-based system (possibly according to DDD) you will be notified about changes. For example, if the price of a product has changed, a PriceUpdatedEvent will be thrown. Any system interested in price updates can listen and react to those events. In most cases the reaction triggered by an event should be idempotent. This […]

Concrete vs Generic – The story of a data model

The story of a project In the last project I was working on, we struggled a lot with our data model. The task was to replace an old product service with a new one. The old system has grown over time, was hard to maintain and the guys who made it have been gone a […]

DynamoDB with Kotlin and Spring Boot (Part 2)

About a month ago I published a short article about Kotlin, Spring Boot and DynamoDB. The post shows a basic setup for DynamoDB with Kotlin and Spring Boot. However, it doesn’t show a lot of aspects related to typical database implementations such as auditing or migrations. To fill this gap, I prepared an example project […]

DynamoDB with Kotlin and Spring Boot (Part 1)

During the last week I implemented my first persistence layer with DynamoDB using Spring Boot and Kotlin. As I stumbled over a couple of obstacles, I decided to summarize what I did and how my final implementation looked like. Dependencies The dependencies are pretty straight forward. I decided to use Spring Data for DynamoDB and […]

Event Sourcing with Kotlin

Some weeks ago I published a demo project on GitHub showing a Domain Driven Design with Kotlin. You can find the original blog post right here. Now I took the approach one step further and added Event Sourcing to the demo. Here’s what I did. Event Sourcing The basic idea of Event Sourcing is to […]

Don’t depend on details – an example

I recently read Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin. The book gives a simple advice: don’t depend on details! For Uncle Bob details are things like the database or message broker. Your architecture shouldn’t depend on the actual used implementation of those details. Whether your are using Oracle, MySQL or DynamoDB, whether it’s ActiveMQ, Kinesis […]

find vs. get

Three years ago I wrote a blog post with the provoking title “Don’t use Optionals for data repositories“. The post received a couple of critical comments and I had the feeling that I didn’t made my point clear. This week I stumbled over the same topic again, but from a slightly different point of view. […]

Testing @ConfigurationProperties in Spring Boot

I recently worked on a library for using AWS Kinesis in Spring Boot. As many other libraries, this particular one provided a powerful configuration. To implement the configuration, we used Spring Boot’s @ConfigurationProperties (as described here). This article gives some insights on how we did our testing. You can find the source code on GitHub: […]

Object updater pattern in Kotlin

Updating data is one of the most frequent use-cases in applications. But it might also be a painful task which results in a bunch of ugly code. I recently stumbled over a typical update scenario in a Domain-Driven-Design (DDD) application. In the following, I want to show an elegant solution implemented in Kotlin (a Java […]