Articles

When I had just transitioned into a senior role a couple of years ago, a junior developer in my team asked me a technical question. I was busy tackling a pretty important issue which required my full attention so I didn’t give him the time he deserved. Basically what I answered him was: “Just Google It…” Fast forward a couple of months. I am scrolling through Twitter and see an interesting discussion. [Read More]

Early september 2019, it finally happened. I had been ignoring the warning signs for years. Instead of pacing myself for the marathon which is a career, I sprinted, running ever faster, harder, better… only to fall on my face. I had burned out. As stated in the first post of this series, these are things which helped ME. This blog post is not a replacement for seeking professional help. This week I will talk about one of the first tasks I was given by my psychologist in order to get back on my feet. [Read More]

Early september 2019, it finally happened. I had been ignoring the warning signs for years. Instead of pacing myself for the marathon which is a career, I sprinted, running ever faster, harder, better… only to fall on my face. I had burned out. That was 4 months ago and next week, I will rejoin my colleagues at work. As we reach this phase of my recovery, I want to take the time to list some of the things which helped me get back on top. [Read More]

Yes! A month ago, Github announced we can finally have free private repositories. I was very excited about this news. There are a few projects I would have prefered to keep private but I was too cheap to pay for the private repositories. Problem solved… Or is it? As soon as I made some repositories private I realized that making my repositories private came at a cost: NOBODY CAN SEE YOUR REPO (DHU! [Read More]

A colleague of mine recently started exploring Event Sourcing. While his focus is on .NET and mine is on Java, I was more than glad to help him out. I pointed him to Event Store as a great place to start. A couple of hours later he shared a link to his github, proclaiming he “had done it”. The warm feeling you get when helping a colleague discover something new was rising up inside me… until it was taken away again when he dropped the following line on me. [Read More]

With the rise of chatbots and other linguistical applications the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has attracted quite some attention. My experience with NLP thus far has consisted of the following steps: Take a String.class Send it over to an online NLP engine (wit.ai, luis.ai or other friends) Get back the intents/entities Use them in a switch(intent) I know many people have a similar experience because it is so damn easy, but it has always bothered me to be dependent on a remote service. [Read More]

“It is not about you… it is about sharing what you know.” I heard these words a lot in the past few days. Which is why this will be the first and last post about me personally. I am currently in San Francisco, taking some time off after Oracle Code One (OCO). OCO is the biggest conference for my favorite programming language (Java). Looking back, the sessions which had the most impact on me had very little to do with code. [Read More]