A short introduction to operator types, how to use them, and their downsides — Swift is quite a flexible language, providing you with many tools to modify and augment it as you seem fit. One of these augmentations is the support for custom or overloaded operators. What Are Custom Operators? Swift allows you to define your own operators besides the predefined set of operators, like ==, +, …

Inject valuable metadata into your code — Setting variables at build-time can provide valuable metadata to our application that wasn’t available when writing the code or even at runtime. We can control feature-flags, or build information, like a version number, without updating the Go-code constantly. Versioning a Go Project Imagine we have version/version.go in the main package github.com/benweidig/goapp

Understand the similarities and when to use what — Even though interfaces and abstract classes have many similarities at first glance — especially after introducing default methods — they have different use cases and capabilities. TABLE OF CONTENTS Interfaces Abstract Classes Interface or Abstract Class? Why not use both? Behavioral Contract vs. Shared Logic Note: Java 8 is assumed…

Iterator + Splitting => Spliterator — Java has multiple types for traversing elements of a source. My last article showed how java.util.Iterator<T> and java.util.ListIterator<T> can be used to traverse data structures like Collections. The concept of iterators is supported since Java 1.2, but got a new relative, java.util.Spliterator<T>, in Java 8. Spliterator<T> Besides traversing sequences of data…

There’s more than just “for” and “while” — Iterating data structures is one of the most common tasks you’ll encounter. Everyone knows the classics, like for or while. But there are more ways to iterate in Java that provide a lot more functionality. Note: Java 8 is assumed, but the Java 10 feature Local Variable Type Inference is…

How JSR310 changed the way we handle date and time — Dealing with date and time is a cumbersome task in many programming languages. But with Java 8, the JDK provides us with a comprehensive and completely new API, changing the way we deal with time-related concepts. Even though JSR310 was introduced with Java 8, the code example will use a…

The most commonly used Stream operations — The three methods, map, filter, and reduce, are the cornerstone of any functional programming. Usually, our data pipelines consist of one or more intermediate operations, transforming (aka mapping) and/or filtering elements, and a terminal operation to gather the data again (aka reducing). With just these three, we can do a…

More concise code with simpler variable declarations — Java is often criticized as being too verbose. One aspect contributing to this characterization is the requirement to specify every type explicitly, which leads to a lot of additional noise. A new way of declaring local variables with less clutter was given to us with JDK 10 and JEP 286…

When Date and Time broke in our project — We use java.util.Locale to format dates, numbers, currency, and more. But in some circumstances, these formatted strings have changed with JDK 9, leading to a multitude of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) bugs. TABLE OF CONTENTS What Are Locales? Where Do Locales Come From? What Changed With JDK 9? How to Deal…