In the 9 years of running Baeldung, we've never been through anything like this pandemic

And, if making my courses more affordable for a while is going to help you stay in business, land a new job, make rent or be able to provide for your family - then it's well worth doing.

Effective immediately, all Baeldung courses are 33% off their normal prices!

You'll find all three courses in the menu, above.

In the 9 years of running Baeldung, we've never been through anything like this pandemic

And, if making my courses more affordable for a while is going to help you stay in business, land a new job, make rent or be able to provide for your family - then it's well worth doing.

Effective immediately, all Baeldung courses are 33% off their normal prices!

You'll find all three courses in the menu, above.

At the very beginning of last year, I decided to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung. Haven't missed a review since.

Here we go…

1. Spring and Java

A monster-post all about what's coming in Java 9.

An interesting read on bringing in some concepts from Go into JUnit.

A while I haven't used Go before, I can definitely see how the approach makes sense in a lot of scenarios.

>> How to map encrypted database columns with Hibernate’s @ColumnTransformer annotation [thoughts-on-java.org]

A code-focus explanation of how to store sensitive data in the DB by using an encrypted column.

A quick and practical intro to the Page Object pattern; this is very close to the way I now write all my end-to-end tests.

Also worth reading:

Webinars and presentations:

Time to upgrade:

2. Technical

A practical and cool writeup here – trying to find the relation between heart rate and pace of running.

I have a soft spot for this kind of analysis, after doing a couple of years of Mahout work and digging through similar datasets.

We earn our troubleshooting chops on hard-mode.

That's cool, because it turns out that – all of that stress of looking at things failing in production – makes us better engineers.

This quick writeup is a very high-level look at out options with the goal of better navigating this very nuanced and important landscape.

Some very useful ElasticSearch practical tips from the Loggly team.

Getting some of these right can make or break your solution – as I personally learned the hard way over the last two and a half years of working with ES.

Also worth reading:

3. Musings

A good answer to a very common question if you're doing any kind of Scrum – especially in the beginning.

Static Analysis is one of those tools that, once picked up by a team, won't be abandoned any time soon. A small team is no different, and this quick writeup explores why it does make sense here as well.

I realize this is just scratching the surface and understanding how populations shrink and grow is a deep topic.

That being said, this was a good primer.

If you're doing consulting, this piece is going to help you out, if only to give you the context to step away from hourly billing.

And if you're on this path, have a look at the “Hourly Billing is Nuts” book as well.

Also worth reading:

4. Comics

And my favorite Dilberts of the week:

5. Pick of the Week