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Reading notes on The Art of Action

Was positively surprised by the Art of Action by Stephen Bungay. The book explores the delicate balance of plans, actions and results in larger organisations. One of the interesting points is that in certain aspects military thought and tradition is surprisingly more advanced than the business one - having to deal with large scale coordination 1-2 hundred years ahead of the corporations (napoleonic wars v 1970’s for the corporate world). In this sense, the bigger corporations trying to stay lean and agile should rather take the lessons from the advanced military institutions rather than try to emulate the inappropriate “startup” mentality.
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Spring @Transactional programmatically

Beware: this post is WIP. An an enterprise developer, it’s easy to get used to the conveniences of Spring (Boot) so much that it becomes an issue on itself. Take @Transactional. Arguably, one of the few core features of Spring that does make us more productive in development. But at times it can be slightly inconvenient to rely solely on annotation for transaction boundary setup: It might not be desireable to have a database transaction open throughout the whole request processing, e.
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Postgres jsonb_agg children cart

Selecting lists of related entities from RDBMS’es can be a chore at times. Especially when ORM’s aren’t used or desired. jsonb_agg of postgres can be a convenient workaround for these cases:

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GCP Bucket as a Distributed Locking Primitive

I was looking for a simple way to prevent business users executing same slow and expensive action simultaneously. Something like a lock file, but more distributed. And I wasn’t very much in the mood of setting up Hazelcast or Zookeper, or a database for this kind of a trivial task.

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Java Integration Tests v Spring Context – when less is more

When doing integration testing within a Spring (Boot) based project, we tend to use some sort of Spring context. Setting it up isn’t free. Careless tests composition can lead to much time wasted on re-creating those contexts, and will make running tests painfully long very quickly. There are simple techniques of keeping this overhead to the minimum. Ideally – start only one test context for the whole run.