Smart Coders' Blog

Introducing paid integration tests

Very often systems that you work on connect with external services. Some of the interactions with those are paid, some are free. Testing the free integrations is straightforward - you write tests and execute them every time you want. The only constraint here can be rate limits set by different

Why speaking at a conference is a good idea...

...even if the conference is online only Participation in the events like conferences and/or meetups was always a good idea. There are lots of articles about it eg. top ones 1 [https://curtiscoulter.com/why-do-people-attend-conferences-5-key-reasons-for-attendees-and-event-organizers/] , 2 [https://www.takeflyte.com/reasons-to-attend-conferences] or 3 [https://medium.com/swlh/attending-a-conference-is-worth-your-money-but-not-because-of-the-information-25256763b814] even

Using IBM Cloud AppID with WebSphere Liberty OpenID Connect Client

Recently I needed to create a POC setup for a client where our software would run in a k8s cluster in IBM Cloud, and the authentication and authorization would be handled by some external user registry. Since we're in the IBM Cloud ecosystem, I thought of App ID [https://www.

Docker on M1 Mac

Using Docker on an M1 Mac for day-to-day activities is still a pain; a lot of plugins we use don't support the platform switch, and even when executed manually in the terminal, QEMU is painfully slow (I gave up after about 10 minutes of it processing the db2start command...). One

Office

So we have an office now. My co-founder and I have been working remotely for more than eight years and for three at Smart Coders. That's quite a change, and there are a few reasons for it, some of them are driven by our clients. Anyways, we're just getting started,

One step closer to abandoning time changes twice a year in the EU

The Guardian writes [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/31/eu-recommend-member-states-abolish-daylight-saving-time] : > The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn, with many people in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year. Apparently 80% of 4.6

Anywhere Workers

An interesting and very well presented study [https://www.and.co/anywhere-workers] from AND CO [https://www.and.co] about remote work. Being a remote worker myself, on and off, for a number of years now, I find their study to be a great inspiration for some introspection. > Those who’

assertTrue vs assertThat vs assertJ

A while ago we’ve participated in a discussion about the pros and cons of using assertJ and assertThat over assertTrue1. We’ve heard some arguments against using assertThat and assertJ that we really did not anticipate (e.g. a dev expressed that he prefers to see exactly what methods

Could it be the beginning of the end of DST in Europe?

Ars Technica reports [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/daylight-saving-time-isnt-worth-it-european-parliament-ministers-say/] : > Earlier this week the European Parliament voted 384 to 153 to review whether Daylight Saving Time is actually worth it. Although the resolution it voted on was non-binding, the majority reflected a growing dissatisfaction with a system that has been

Continuous Authentication

Rich Mogul, writing for Securosis [https://securosis.com/blog/face-id-is-the-future-of-security-authentication]: > Apple didn’t just throw a facial recognition sensor into the iPhone and replace a fingerprint sensor – they enabled a new security modality. I call this “continuous authentication”. I’ve been thinking about it ever since getting the new iPhone

Working only with iOS

I’ve been on vacation* since Friday afternoon, but I didn’t manage to close everything that needed to be closed before leaving. My wife also needed to finish some things for work, so both of us spent Monday and a chunk of Tuesday working. My wife came better prepared;

Maven Release Plugin and Jazz SCM: Prepare

The Jazz [http://jazz.net] scm command does not seem to play nice with maven-release-plugin. When doing a mvn release:prepare, things are going fine, until, at the very end, Maven returns a build failure: Error code for Jazz SCM deliver command - 53 After a quick internet search [https:

AMD is Back with Ryzen

Ian Cuttress for Anandtech: > Price for Performance is still one of AMD's strong points. For the multitude of tests where that $499 1800X is able to match or beat a $1049 i7-6900K, it directly translates to a 2x in price/performance. Other processors have a smaller price/performance ratios, but

Server Timeout in Eclipse

When you're hit with a server startup timeout in Eclipse, suggesting you should increase the value, it's actually Eclipse's setting, not the server's. You can change it in the server’s settings in Eclipse:

That was Fast

The two PDF files shared as proof of the attack can be considered weapons: > [...] SHA-1 colliding files are currently breaking SVN repositories [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168774#c23%3CPaste%3E]. Subversion servers use SHA-1 for deduplication and repositories become corrupted when two colliding files are committed

SHA-1 is Really Dead Now

Matt Green: > In crypto we have the idea that hash function collisions should be really hard to find, even if they're 'useless'. [...] [A real-world collision attack] is the equivalent of finding out that your scalpel wasn't sterilized properly. It may not verifiably have germs on it, but the whole instrument

Eclipse, Maven and Classpath Errors

I’ve been working on some J2EE projects in Eclipse, where, at some point, Eclipse would spit out the following error, without even telling me where that error is coming from: Invalid classpath publish/export dependency /my-dependecy. Project entries not supported. It took a while, and I’ve found that

WebSphere Liberty Startup Timeout

I’ve been searching for this for a while, and finally stumbled upon it by accident. It’s a property of the Application Manager in server.xml. You can set it like this: or, more likely:

J2EE Class Loader Special

I was stumped for a while when working on a project for work. I must underline that, prior to developing this app, I’ve never really ventured into the J2EE world. I knew it was a bit different from J2SE, but I didn’t know what the differences were. I’