Symptoms, not Causes: Addressing Some Common Complaints about Git Rebase
This article is based on a LinkedIn comment I wrote in response to a comment mentioning the following two problems in relation to Git Rebase:
Posts by Category
- Git 7
- Productivity 7
- Software Design 5
- Craftsmanship 5
- Testing 4
- CI/CD 3
- Dev Culture 3
- UX 2
- Code 2
- Game Development 2
- Code Review 2
- Cargo Cult 1
- TDD 1
- Leadership 1
- Graphics 1
- Soft Skills 1
Git
Effective Git: Beyond the Basics
We all have to start somewhere. For most of us, our Git journey begins with about 5 commands and the mental model of a file-sharing tool like Dropbox or OneD...
Git Tip: Word Diff
If you use Git in the command line, when using commands like git diff and similar ones, it does a line-by-line diff by default. This is also what most pull r...
Git Myth: “git fetch just downloads meta-data”
This is a misconception that I’ve seen or heard many times, sometimes almost in those exact words.
Intentional Commits: Continuous Feedback
Intentional commits is the term I use for habits and workflows that help with creating Git commits1 exactly the way we intend to. The opposite are incidental...
On Formatting Commit Messages
Many developers are unaware that there is a quasi-standard convention for commit messages originating from Git itself and the Linux kernel. Following this co...
The Commit Scope Matrix
Commits should be atomic, but the common advice to only separate refactorings from new functionality does not cover the whole spectrum. I use four main categ...
Productivity
Effective IntelliJ: Part 2
Have you already read part 1?
Effective IntelliJ: Part 1
There are some features in IntelliJ that I consider rather foundational, but I often see the average developer not using them and doing things the hard (and ...
The 2 IDE Shortcuts You Should Know and Use – But Probably Don’t
There are two keyboard shortcuts that I recommend to other developers all the time. You don’t need to know every keyboard shortcut, and for things you rarely...
Best Practice: Code Review Review
Your team is doing feature branching and pull requests, but the code quality is still subpar? What many people don’t know: The code reviewers are simply appr...
Terminal Tip: Effective Use of the Command History
No more “pressing up arrow 20 times”!
Terminal Tip: Reverse Search Recent Commands
You recently ran a long shell command that you need to run again, like mvn -D test -lots-of-more-options?
Help, I’m Drowning in Emails!
When pair programming, I occasionally see software developers with a full inbox. Like, literally hundreds or even thousands of unread emails amassed over mon...
Software Design
The Purpose of Getters and Setters
First of all, I don’t advocate for getters and setters at all. Don’t use them (especially setters) if you find an alternative. There usually is a better desi...
SOLID Principles: Common Misconceptions
The SOLID principles for software design can be a helpful thinking and communication tool of a software developer, even if perhaps just as a reason to think ...
SRP Misunderstood
The Single Reponsibility Principle (SRP) is commonly misunderstood1. Often you might hear explanations like “a class should do only one thing”, sometimes eve...
Technical Empathy
Technical empathy is one of those concepts that seemed so obvious once I was aware of them, and yet it was quite a revelation when I first heard of it from M...
The SRP is not SoC
You might be familiar with the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP), one of the SOLID principles coined by author Robert C. Martin. The SRP states that “A m...
Craftsmanship
Refactoring (Mis)understood
People refer to all kinds of changes to existing code as refactoring, which is a common case of semantic diffusion.
Not an Acronym
People in the tech industry infamously like acronyms. So much indeed that they sometimes turn perfectly normal words into something that looks like an acrony...
Clean Code is Not a Style Guide
The term is sometimes used to refer to a specific and opinionated way of writing code, the one described in the popular book “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin...
Code Review Best Practices Revisited
In the past, my advice for effective code reviews was something along the lines of:
Taste Your Own Soup
Imagine this scenario: A restaurant cook learned from their grandmother the secret of her tasty soup. “Always put a tablespoon of salt in your soup”. And so ...
Testing
Testing equals And hashCode Using EqualsVerifier
I learned about EqualsVerifier from a technical coach I know. A few months ago we met (not for the first time) at a conference we both spoke at, and after a ...
Intro to Mutation Testing
Mutation testing is a technique for analyzing the quality and effectiveness of your tests. Despite being very simple to set up (at least in Java) and able to...
The Myth of the Inverted Test Pyramid
Every time I see someone advocating for inverting the test pyramid, or testing everything with slower, more flaky higher level tests, it’s well intended but ...
Expressive Tests in JUnit 5 Using Nested Test Classes
I discovered some nice features in JUnit 5 that I haven’t really seen before in the wild, so I thought I’d share them with you.
CI/CD
Some Counter-intuitive Truths about CI/CD
Intuition: “Integrating more frequently causes more merge conflicts.”
The CI/CD Misconception
The terms CI (continuous integration), CD (continuous delivery), and the umbrella term CI/CD are often misunderstood and misused. Many think that continuous ...
CI/CD is Not a Tool
CI/CD is something you do, not something you have.
Dev Culture
Countering the Damage of Well-intentioned Misinformation
Following are some thoughts I recently had about cargo cult and Brandolini’s Law in software development.
What is a DevOps Team?
A DevOps team is a development team that practices DevOps. It is not an operations team that handles deployments and build pipelines, monitoring, infrastruct...
Cargo Cult in Software Development
The phenomenon of cargo cult is very common in the software industry. With this article I want to raise awareness for the problem of cargo cult and provide s...
UX
Render Javadoc/KDoc within IntelliJ
Did you know that IntelliJ can render documentation directly within the IDE? I discovered this a few weeks ago and have used it since. I think it’s a vastly ...
Accessibility for Color Blindness
Did you know that roughly 1 in 12 men are affected by red-green color deficiency? That’s about 8 percent of men and between 4 and 5 percent of the population...
Code
StringBuilder Cargo Cult
This post is based on an answer I posted on Stack Overflow. The code example was submitted as part of the question by Bruno Rozendo under CC BY-SA 3.0. Note:...
On Line Length Limits
At the beginning of a new project, when the team (or the team lead) chooses a coding style, a common approach is to use a popular style guide for the program...
Game Development
Snake in JavaFX (Part 2)
Intro
Snake in JavaFX (Part 1)
Intro
Code Review
Code Review: Text-based Monopoly in Java
Originally posted on Code Review Stack Exchange on 07.09.2021. Question asked by user “DexMax” and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Answer provided by me and lic...
Code Review: Common Beginner Mistakes
After a long time, I once again did a few code reviews on Code Review Stack Exchange. One of them (a beginner’s implementation of a rock-paper-scissors game)...
Cargo Cult
Git is not an Acronym
“Git,” the name of the popular version control system, is not an acronym but an English slang term chosen by developer Linus Torvalds. Many incorrectly spell...
TDD
Do Unit Tests Make Refactoring Harder?
This is probably one of the most common narratives against TDD (test-driven development) that I hear. It’s often stated by developers who may have shortly tr...
Leadership
Technical Leadership Beyond the Default
Based on my observations and experiences others told me about regarding different kinds of technical leads or lead developers (including myself in some small...
Graphics
Shaders – Part 1: Post-processing
In this series, we will look into what games and game engines do to create those neat graphics effects that add to a game’s realism and/or aesthetics: Effect...
Soft Skills
IT Consulting ‒ The Soft Parts
This article is work in progress. Originally published on 2026-01-25, I still have a lot of things I want to talk about, but maybe you already find it valuab...