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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. ...

Code Quality is a topic that often results in very heated discussions. These mostly, if not always, are about details, such as tabs vs spaces, about interfaces versus abstract classes and what constitutes good “Javadoc”. These discussions often boil down to a lot of yes/no arguments during Code Reviews, almost always revolving around Code Style. ...

Over the past 18 years (more than half my life), I’ve been running my own server. From hand-me-down hardware to the latest full server purchase, a proper tower server. This last purchase was a little over 3 years ago, a couple of weeks before my daughter was born. The idea was to set it up and then run it for 3 years and see what to do next. I had big ambitions with this server, running a whole bunch of server software for various things. 3 years ago this seemed like a good plan, but a couple of months ago I started worrying, now what? Will I spend lots of money and buy something proper again, knowing I had underutilized the one I had. I ran a bunch of stuff on it, but every couple of days some security issue would come along and I’d have to go over everything. The maintenance of the server was becoming quite an issue. All sorts of custom software with custom issues. ...

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. ...

Ever feel like you're just not listened to. That your warnings fall on deaf ears and the wrong decision is being made. This is something that a lot of developers feel, it's called the Cassandra Syndrome. Unfortunately, it happens to all of us because we're not good at selling our ideas and selling ourselves. We're shrugged off with various reasons. The unfortunate truth is, this is the right call, not because we're wrong. More often than not, we're completely unable to properly reason and sell what we believe. We often claim trust we haven't yet deserved this. Our challenge is to break through this pattern. ...

Perhaps a bit early, but there are some things that I'm excited about in the coming year that I want to share, the following topics pique my interest: ...

A model is a central component within any application. This model decides what your view is on the outside world. As such, it effectively makes or breaks your application (your business rules can change, but if your view on the outside world fundamentally changes, you're effectively caught with your pants down, and that's embarrassing! To be honest though, this is rarely where applications fail, because such models are often conceived with enough knowledge to do this properly. ...

Close to 10 years ago I found out that I was dyslexic, explaining many of the troubles I've had in school (and subsequently university and work thereafter). These troubles were mostly in the category of "things that are hard to pick up". Over the years I've found a mode for myself to not let it be too much of a handicap. Note that it really is a handicap, it's something that poses (a set of) significant limitations in your day to day work, limitations you can't fix, though you generally can work around them. ...

An ever recurring topic of discussion is, when starting major maintenance or a new project, is: What web methodology/technology should we use? ...