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Web Accessibility

And that means...? If you work in web development, you have probably heard of the term "Web accessibility", but do you know what it really is about? When we develop a product we usually try to build something that looks good to the user, something that is easy to use

Content Delivery Flow

Content Delivery Flow

Whether you are in search for new content management system or optimizing internal processes related to the content - one very useful thing you could do is to design your content delivery tree. The diagram of content delivery gives clear view on many important features that the CMS should support.

Zooplus You returns to Madrid

Zooplus You returns to Madrid

What? Zooplus is searching for talented people [https://zooplusspain.recruitee.com/] to join our Madrid team. We're looking for YOU! Why? It's already been more than 2 years since our last edition in Madrid. Just an eyeblink in which our sales have been increased by ~60% (€1.2 bn), our

Automate even more things

Automate even more things

DRY - Do not repeat what you do Repetitive tasks may consume your time. Worse, they require your focus and force you to think about them, even if they are so easy, even if they seem to be just simple copy-paste. They simply utilize time of your CPU - brain,

Event driven infrastructure on AWS, Kinesis or SNS+SQS?

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Event driven infrastructure on AWS, Kinesis or SNS+SQS?

Recently at work, we were designing our new messaging system to broadcast changes to multiple destinations. The aim is to simplify the communication chain and to reduce coupling between applications. It is quite clear to us that an event driven system is the best fit here. Event driven, it sounds

The Law of Demeter - am I the only one who misunderstood it?

The Law of Demeter - am I the only one who misunderstood it?

Have you ever wondered what is your brain good at? Ask any neuroscientist and they’ll tell you it’s really good at thinking as little as possible. It makes perfect sense from the evolutionary point of view - it’s a very energy consuming process. That’s the reason

Generating java model with inheritance from swagger specification

Generating java model with inheritance from swagger specification

Nowadays software requires a lot of integration. Services expose their interface and separate consumers from implementation details. Contract first approach [http://docs.spring.io/spring-ws/site/reference/html/why-contract-first.html] is well known as a best practice since years, and this approach is not restricted to WSDL based web-services. Also

What do I believe in

Below are my guiding principles, that are the basis of what, how and why am I doing with regards to software development. Long term development speed First and foremost I understand my main responsibility as delivering value as fast as possible in the long term. By delivering value I mean

Code quality as a winning factor

Software development seems to me like the only discipline where practitioners can get away with producing crap. If you're a doctor and you screw up a surgery or a treatment, in the worst case you will kill your patient, in the best you will not make his/hers situation worse.

Scalability Made Easy with Serverless Architecture

Scalability Made Easy with Serverless Architecture

Serverless architecture is relatively new, more frequent usage started around 2014. The idea is to abstract the servers and make the execution of the apps easier. It doesn't mean that the servers are gone, it just moves them to another level (platform) and they become part of the platform service.

Sequences in Hibernate

Sequences in Hibernate

What are we looking at Why do we even use Hibernate? Well it's convenient and easy to understand! Do we know how Hibernate works? Of course! We use it in production for years! Those are usually the answers from everybody that uses Hibernate. Well in general I agree with the

Writing good tests (part 2)

Last time [https://tech.zooplus.com/writing-acceptance-tests-the-right-way/] I just barely scratched the topic of writing test scenarios. I briefly gave only a few hints like "avoid unnecessary information", "don't include implementation details" or "don't repeat yourself in different scenarios". This time I'd like to dig deeper and present results of

API documentation as code with Swagger, AsciiDoc, Cucumber and Structurizr

API documentation as code with Swagger, AsciiDoc, Cucumber and Structurizr

With the growing love of API at zooplus, more and more our apps & services are provided with a REST API. We love REST API because it's simple and flexible. To keep the simplicity and flexibility, we need to be proactive in providing accurate information about our API to the users,

Perfect Unit Test

This is a perfect unit test. @Test public void Should_Sum_When_ArgumentsAreSmall() { // given Sumator sumator = new Sumator(); // when Integer result = sumator.sum(1, 2); // then assertThat(result).isEqualTo(3); } Take a look. Take a deep look. If all your unit tests look like this, you’re saved. Your career

Visual test driven development (VTDD) for responsive web pages using Galen

Responsive Web Design (RWD) makes a web page look good on all devices, but testing responsive web pages is a tedious task. So the challenge that we took up was to implement a strategy for testing responsive web pages with the test first approach. For some time my team was

Writing good tests (part 1)

Everyone knows how NOT to write unit tests, either you know the rules and avoid pitfalls, or you don't know the rules and struggle with hard to maintain unit tests. The same rules apply to higher level tests, but there are also other things to consider. We, in the team,

God classes sound nice, but they are the Devil

God classes sound nice, but they are the Devil

We have different names for it, but every software developer has seen them: one or more classes that seem to know everything and follow absolutely no programming principle. The class has 1000+ lines of code, class fields, static fields, methods with DB calls, static methods, if statements in an if

UI or not to UI

UI or not to UI

Initial idea 4 months ago we had a discussion on how to continue with admin UI development. The problems we face is that our admin is mostly written in PHP with old school design talking over hessian with Java backend. So you already see a lot of problems just in