The Red Hat twitter account just asked this question : "Communities grow by uplifting others. What is one piece of advice you'd offer to a new developer? Reply below and then check out some advice from #RedHatter @somalley108 ." Here's my input.

As a general rule, if you're writing software, you're probably pretty intelligent. That intelligence, while important, of course, can also become a hindrance. For example, I've been told by coworkers, "You may write buggy code, but I don't" and "We don't need techincal oversight". I think both of those statements are patently false, and they -- and others like them -- always take me back to that advice from my first manager, Chris Anderson, gave me way back in 1997:

It's really easy to walk in to a coding review, a design session, or one of a myriad of other meetings with your ideas and think they're the best. It's also really easy to overlook the fact that other people in that room are also pretty intelligent -- maybe even more so (it happens), and that we all have blindspots and weaknesses. In my experience, and I've certainly been on both sides more than I care to admit, many conflicts in software development are ego-driven. There's a difference between being passionate about something and being an arrogant jerk. The latter type does nobody any good, so check your ego. Go in humbly, and see what there is to learn from your coworkers, even if you're more senior than they. With that mindset, everyone will come out a winner.

The project I'm working on is using Mockk in the unit tests. It's a great library that has made true unit testing so much easier. I ran into a problem, though, where I needed a method I was mocking to return the value it was receiving. To be more specific, we were passing an object to a Spring repository method that had been built inside the method to test, and, to test thoroughly, I needed to get to that object. Turns out, that's pretty easy to do with Mockk. Let's take a look...

Merry Christmas!

A user in #kotlin on Freenode asked how to run a Kotlin script. While the Kotlin docs are pretty clear on how to do that, I thought I'd make a quick post to show how to make an easily executable Kotlin script.

With my recent job change, I've gotten a chance to use Spring Boot in anger a bit. It's been fun, and I've learned a fair bit about the current state of Spring (I still love you, Jakarta EE !). One of my tasks involved adding a query method to a repository, and I wanted to make sure the query worked before I pushed it upstream. To do that confidently, of course, required a unit test. In this post, I'll show how remarkably simple it is to test Spring Repositories using Flyway to set up schemas and test data.