Possible Brexit Fallout: Decentralization

While some things are still certain after the Brexit vote in June, most aren't. Though the argument that won the day was all about "taking back control" of the country, at least short term a quite likely result might be that nothing much will change in terms of control and the people will have merely exchanged one aloof, self-serving elite for another. I still think that Brexit is a royally stupid idea but in the end only time will tell. A crisis is ... Read more

UI Movement

UI Movement is a website that showcases user interface designs on a daily basis as an inspiration for your own designs. The designs itself are mostly sourced from Dribbble - the show and tell site for designers. Originally just a newsletter in the vein of an MVP, UI Movement has developed into a fully-fledged website with designs organised in categories such as commerce, dashboard or menu. Read more

Mockito 2 now available

Last week version 2.1.0 of the Mockito testing framework for Java has been released. For more information on this latest iteration check out this page. As the name suggests, Mockito allows you to mock object behaviour during unit tests. When writing unit tests you only want to test a particular unit's behaviour (hence the name). Depending on the programming language used such a unit might be a function, a procedure or - most commonly in today's object-oriented programming environments - a ... Read more

Anti-patterns: Rewriting Software

It's one of those fallacious patterns in software development that though well-known to cause trouble without creating any significant benefit unfortunately ever seems to truly go away: The Software Rewrite. In general, software developers tend to not particularly like working on old - or legacy - code, especially if it's not been written by themselves or if they feel that due to aspects like time and budget constraints they didn't have the opportunity to get the software architecture right from the get-go. ... Read more

Less Is More

What's true for design in general certainly is true for software design in particular: Less is more - or paraphrasing Dieter Rams - "Write less software in order to write better software." A few weeks ago I read this interesting article by web accessibility consultant Heydon Pickering. In this blog post he argues that the only foolproof way of writing performant web applications is to write less code. Sure, all that fancy minification, transpiling, JIT / AoT compilation and optimisation stuff might ... Read more