It is Christmastime.
Clean your desk and the content of your workstation. Upgrade your tools and your development environment to the actual version.
It is time to add automated build pipelines, TDD, ATDD, and Docker to your toolbox. Embrace agile approaches.
Work focused. Avoid overtime. Prioritize outcomes instead of outputs. Enjoy family life, practice sport, and pursue continuous training.
It is time to sell the last fax device in your office and plan to remove your big printer. Burn your paper documentation and discard your folders. Please store all the information digitally and have an effective search application in your company. Use Wiki to publish company data and store knowledge for all collaborators.
Have a professional handset and a good camera for video conferences.
Put all your documents on your company drive and index all this information. Finding relevant data by keyword searching is a huge gain of time. Another advantage is no more backup of workstations and notebooks. All mission-critical information is always on the company’s drives.
Organize a real team room. Colocate all your team members, design on big whiteboards. Please use analog Scrum boards. You need big whiteboards, analog Scrum boards, meeting corners.
Restart your brown bag training program. A Friday beer event is always a welcome event.
Celebrate success after each major release of your products. Another gain is tension just disappears when people talk around snacks and drink together a glass of wine.
As a Java developer, it is time to use state of the industry tools and improve your daily work
Java 9 JDK, if you are still working with Java 7 or earlier, you are a laggard
Java 8 public support will end in the middle of next year.
Java 10 shall be available next year. The early releases are already online. Download them and try the new features. The local variable declarations are a huge improvement.
You are a laggard and security danger if you are still using Java 6 or earlier.
Gradle
Build, deliver, and deploy your solution with one keystroke.
Continuous integration, delivery and deployment pipelines.
Never again manually configure a deployment by hand.
Test environments with Docker
Never say again, it is working on my machine.
Modern IDE such as IntelliJ IDEA
Splendid Gradle support.
Marvelous JUnit 5 support.
Alt-Enter anywhere brings up context-sensitive options. Run a test, create a test, create a subclass, convert to closure, generate missing test methods, remove an explicit type, split into declaration and assignment, introduce local variable. The suggestions are limitless.
Great Java 8 support, suggesting lambda notation where appropriate!
Even displaying anonymous inner class usage (collapsed) as if it was written using a lambda expression.
Quality with PMD, FindBugs, SonarLint, or the built-in rules of IntelliJ
Banish Flash from your workstation
Agile approaches state you should work at a sustainable pace, forty hours a week. Avoid working overtime during the evenings or weekends.
Enjoy family time, practice sport, give back to the community.
Work with your team, ideally collocated in a team room. Face2Face exchanges and pair working - pair design, pair review, pair programming, pair checkin - are training on the job occasions.
Here are some suggestions to hone your craftsmanship
Practice coding dojos to improve your programming skills.
Read good technical books, at least one book per quarter.
Learn new shortcuts and plugins for your favorite IDE.
Improve the agile, lean, Scrum, LeSS approaches in your department.
Refactor daily code and practice clean code.
Become an expert on Git.
Increase self-awareness and work on your soft skills, teamwork shall improve.
I wish you success, fulfillment, happiness, and fun.