Over the past few months I’ve discussed security with family, colleagues and friends. During these conversations I’ve heard the most bizarre statements, ranging from: “anybody can see my data, I don’t have anything to hide” as an excuse to not install recent updates (that admittedly screwed up the system), to “I use weak passwords and don’t mind if these get hacked” as an excuse to not use a password manager and “I want to be online as little as possible so that I can’t lose anything”. People conveniently forget that there’s a lot more going on and all these statements assume that only large scraping bot networks roam the interwebs and are only interested in seeing the data.

For close to a year and a half now, I’ve had the opportunity to be in an architect role. This in itself has been something I’ve been looking forward to for quite a few years now, and I’m very grateful to the people that helped me maneuver into this position. The change to this role went gradually and for quite a while I was still involved in the development effort. This situation has given me a means to reflect on my time as a software developer, and making a case that I don’t want to go back.

With the advent of Java 8, Closures and Lambdas have been added to the language. While this makes it (a lot) easier to create certain constructions (I won’t get into the details here), there are a number of downsides to it.