Yesterday I published 10 most popular blog posts which I wrote in 2015.
I also promised to choose my favorite blog posts and publish that list on my blog.
This year I decided to select blog posts that fulfill these requirements:
- The blog post was published during 2015 AND it wasn't one of my most popular blog posts.
- The blog post must be useful and interesting. This time I selected blog posts that helped me to save time and remove boilerplate code. I also selected one blog post which argues that upfront design is extremely useful when it is done in the right way.
Here are my favorite blog posts that I wrote during the year 2015:
- Spring From the Trenches: Returning Git Commit Information as JSON deserves to be on this because it has saved me a lot of time during this year. I am not afraid of the question: "what version are we running on server X" anymore because answering it takes only a few seconds.
- Writing Clean Tests - Java 8 to the Rescue is one of my favorites because writing it made me realize that I don't have to write boilerplate code if I want capture method parameters or catch exceptions thrown by the tested code.
- Writing Clean Tests - Small Is Beautiful deserves to be on this list because it has helped me to eliminate a lot of boilerplate code and save a lot of time. Nested configuration is indeed a powerful tool and this blog post helps you to use it.
- We Are Gonna Need It is on this list because I think that too many developers think that upfront design is an anti-pattern. Unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the truth.
- Getting Started With Gradle: Integration Testing With the TestSets Plugin made it on this list because I really enjoyed writing it. It is also a quite useful blog post because it helped me to eliminate several lines from my build.gradle file.
I hope that you enjoy reading these blog posts as much as I enjoyed writing them.