Author: frans

Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB) – Part 4: My tour

I’m hiking up a hill 200m over the town of Les Houches. It’s steep and my breath is heavy, but I feel alive. The grass on both sides of the road looks greener than I can remember seeing in a while. The sky is bright blue, a stark contrast to the rainy skies of the past two days.

I turn around and look down. The houses and churches of the town below me are partly hidden behind a trail of clouds resting in the valley. In the distance I can hear church bells, even though it’s a Monday morning.

Suddenly I’m aware that I feel something I haven’t felt in a while: I feel happy.

I’ve been planning this trip for months, and now I’m actually here, on the Tour du Mont Blanc. It might as well be the Camino the Santiago: this is a spiritual experience, to know that many before me walked the exact same route that I’m walking, and many will follow.

Even though I’ve prepared, I don’t know exactly what lies ahead; I don’t even know if I’ll complete the 170km journey around the Mont Blanc massif. But I’m getting closer with every step.

String is not a data structure

Today’s strongly-typed, object-oriented programming languages give you the tools you need to pick up a lot of errors at compile-time, before even one line of your code is executed. However, many programmers don’t take advantage of strong types and write code using generic data types instead of taylormade data structures. This code tends to be error-prone and hard to understand. This article shows you the benefits of using dedicated data structures.

Using WireMock in your unit tests

Most non-trivial applications, especially in today’s microservices world, will call other services using a REST API to perform a task. Unit testing parts of your application that call REST APIs can be difficult and error prone when just using JUnit and Mockito.
This post shows how to use WireMock to mock a REST service with both GET and POST methods in a unit test.