Ürgo Ringo - Product Engineering Blog

Don't write tests against configuration

Why writing tests against production configuration is usually not that good idea and what to do instead.

Where to put application configuration?

What is a good approach to configuration? I will compare drawbacks/benefits of externalizing config vs hardcoding config in code.

microservices

What is a good size for a microservice?

To be able to answer that we should start from a different question: what kind of problems we believe smaller/independently deployable codebases solve better than a monolithic codebase with

spring boot

Building modular apps using Spring

When looking at most of the sample applications and code examples for Spring framework it may seem that everything should be defined as a bean. However, if we want to

hibernate

Hibernate and Domain Model Design

When I first learned about Hibernate about 12 years ago (I guess just about when it was at its peak) I found it to be one of the coolest libraries

design

Illusion of Reuse

I have quite often seen situation where trying to achieve more reuse actually ends up in building the Big Ball of Mud. In some cases it is the Enterprise Domain

tdd

5 Tips for Getting More Out of Your Unit Tests

State of Application Design In vast majority of applications I have seen the domain logic is implemented using a set of Service classes (Transaction Scripts). Majority of these are based

technology

When to Adopt the Next Cool Technology?

What should be the criteria for an organization to decide when is it a good time to update its toolbox? Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the fatigue around JavaScript and frontend tools in general. Although it seems to be more

microapps

Effective Reuse on Frontend

In my previous post I discussed cost of reuse and some strategies how to deal with it on the backend. What about frontend? In terms of reuse both are very similar to each other. When we have more than just a few teams regularly

microservices

Why Over-Reusing is Bad

One of the Holy Grails of software development has always been reuse. In the following post I want to focus on reuse of application logic in its different forms. I will not cover reuse on more abstract levels like ideas or patterns. This will

exceptions

When to Throw an Exception

Simplest rule to figure out whether we need an exception is to think if having a stracktrace will give any value. For example, do we care about stacktrace when some business rule is violated? One widely known principle is that exceptions should be used

javascript

How to Create Data Model Objects in JavaScript

Why it makes sense to use some special facility (constructor function, factory method, class in ES6) for creating objects of Data Model[1] instead of just using object literals and whatever is returned as JSON from server? Data Model objects typically don't have much

design

Rebuilding software is inevitable

No matter how good the initial design is it will start degrading once it's out there. Software design seems to follow the 2nd law of thermodynamics - in a software system the amount of entropy tends to increase over time. The moment something is

domain model

Implementing Validation

TL;DR use Command objects to modify objects of Domain Model check basic validation rules on these Commands use validation framework for checking rules on Commands implement constraints that are "interesting" from business perspective inside Domain Model as part of the behavior

angularjs

Model in AngularJS

AngularJS is one of these frameworks that is deceptively simple at first sight but once you start developing more complex apps you discover that there are quite many questions that don't have a single obvious answer. I guess this can be said about any

user testing

Why delivering features is not enough

Features are good but only if someone is actually using them. So instead of focusing on delivering as many features as quickly as possible it is better to focus on learning what is the product your customers need (note that need and want are

Standup as team health metric

I like standup meetings because they are such good indicators of how well people work together as a team. The standard format for standups is that everyone should be talking about what he did since last standup, what he is planning to do next

Boy Scout Rule is good but not enough

One widely used idea when dealing with legacy systems is the Boy Scout Rule. It offers good incremental strategy for improving your codebase. I find it to be very valuable guideline which is much more practical than creating separate refactoring stories/backlogs. However, I

karma

TDD with AngularJS

In following post I want to show how one can use TDD approach to drive development from scratch with AngularJS. Although the basic idea of TDD is very simple then it has many variations e.g classical or mockist approach. I have long been

ddd

Software design and readability

Software development is mostly about knowledge building – finding out what customers need, what ideas work and what don’t (Lean Software Development). This knowledge is stored in multiple ways inside an organization. Much of it will be in the heads of the people involved

javascript

Making serial XHR calls in AngularJS

In most cases what you need is making just a few calls serially or making multiple calls in parallel. For the first case simple promise chaining works fine and for the second AngularJS provides $q.all(). However, what if you need to make arbitrary