DEV Community: Martin Beentjes

How to design an overview of events

Martin Beentjes — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 13:53:52 +0000

Hey fellow devs!

I am thinking about the following project. I want to create a page which shows an overview of upcoming events. The events are cultural, nature focused. And they follow a somewhat 'local' feeling.

I can simply create a stack of cards, but that is not that 'nature' feeling. How would you approach such a idea? Where can I get good ideas on these ages. I am looking through Dribble but I find it difficult to wrap my head around it.

Which other design resources do you use for inspiration?

Thanks in advance!

Why seems React to be so extremely complex

Martin Beentjes — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 13:36:33 +0000

Let's keep this short. I am working on prototyping some ideas I am having, but React keeps being so unbelievably complex.

I am a backend engineer. However, I would like to extend my knowledge and work on ideas I have. Whenever my mind decides to use React, it always is so hard to only get a project up and running.

My only requirements: it must use TypeScript (because I want to get used to use TypeScript) and I need to call a backend API.

The first idea was to use Ruby on Rails, because well full stack! But then it felt a bit strange so I went to my colleagues. As they are experienced with React, I decided to go that way. The backend isn't that hard, picking or Go, or Spring Boot, whatever. That works just fine.

Complexities seem to occur on the frontend side of things. I got some thing working after just being frustrated and trying over and over. But I do not understand why it seems to be developer unfriendly. The basics work, but then calling the backend I need to add a proxy middleware. And then I something else breaks.

It feels I am not doing what I supposed to do. It feels that I am not using React in the way I should use it. So then I just looked for boilerplate frameworks and I found https://github.com/pankod/next-boilerplate which seemed to work, but wow. What a complexity in there.

So my question is: How do you work on full stack apps when you want to prototype an idea? Did you experience the same when trying React? What frameworks do you use?

Thanks for your time reading this ranting post.

Starting a project...

Martin Beentjes — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 08:47:51 +0000

I am working on a prototype to workout an idea my girlfriend is having. I am proficient with Spring (and Java or Kotlin), but she only works with Python. Now I want to make it possible for her to work on it too with some help from me.

How do you cope with those projects? I am looking at using Rails, but I suspect the prototype to become a real product (or at least one we are heavily going to work on). What is your suggestion on approach?

I am not really concerned about performance, I just want to keep the code clean so do a rewrite is not that hard in the future. So a clean monolithic setup is the way to go for me. Do you know where I can find information regarding raw performance of both frameworks?

Rails is nice because I can setup a lot of code via the CLI and get a lot of boilerplate code out of the box. Spring is useful as there is a lot of documentation and it quite an industry standard.

In both frameworks I am going to incorporate some frontend framework (React or Vue, that is also a choice to make.. What would you choose?).

What would you choose when starting a new project when you Spring knowledge and not that much Rails knowledge but like the Rails approach.

Trying out Ktor as a Spring Developer - The beginning

Martin Beentjes — Sat, 26 Oct 2019 09:53:43 +0000

Introduction

Spring Boot is the standard framework for backend services. Every backend service I write is in Kotlin with Spring Boot. I prefer Kotlin over Java because Kotlin is less verbose and much more concise. From the Kotlin community, more frameworks are being built. Ktor is one of them. What is Ktor?

Ktor is a framework for building asynchronous servers and clients in connected systems using the powerful Kotlin programming language.

— Ktor.io

Research Questions

In this series we are going to explore Ktor and compare it to a simple Spring Boot service. In this adventure, there are many questions to be answered:

What is the performance of a Ktor application versus a Spring Boot application?
What are the resource characteristics of both?
- What is the throughput?
- What is the CPU usage?
- What is the memory usage?
What is the complexity when services grow?
What are the coding conventions compared to each other?
What is the stability of the Ktor framework compared to Spring Boot?

Follow the series

Come along this adventure of exploring Ktor and seeing how it works and performs. I will post tweets regarding this on my twitter handle @martinbeentjes. I also will be sharing projects on GitHub when finished.

This is a cross-post from my blog at beentjes.me.

Feedback

This is the first article in a series I am starting to develop my writing skills. I appreciate any feedback to improve my writing and the series itself. Feel free to contact me on social media or here!

Maven or Gradle?

Martin Beentjes — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 14:54:03 +0000

Currently, I am migrating from Java to Kotlin. One of the changes I am not making is to move from Maven to Gradle. This is something we should probably discuss company wide to do or not.

I am curious about your thoughts, which do you prefer: Maven or Gradle? What made you to move? Or did you switch back?

Note taking as a developer

Martin Beentjes — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 11:19:15 +0000

Four questions:

When you are in a meeting, how do you take your notes?

When you are at a conference, do you take notes of a talk?

When you are brainstorming, how are you taking notes?

What is your way of taking notes of these situations?

Daily routine

Martin Beentjes — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 00:26:12 +0000

Everybody has their daily routine. I thought about sharing my routine with you. I try to get around eight hours of sleep. Before I go to bed, I close off all digital media and go and read a book. I try not to read a book that is not related to my work.

I only try to drink caffeine rich drinks before 15:00.

Time	Description
7:00	Wake up
7:20	Breakfast
8:10	Travel to the office
8:50	Arrive at the office
12:00	Lunchtime
12:30	Have a little walk outside
17:20	Travelling home
18:15	Diner
19:00	Start doing study work / Go to the gym
21:45	Finish study work / Get home from the gym
22:00	Close off all digital media, read a book
22:30	Bedtime

How does your workday look like? And why do you scheduled the way you scheduled it?

Being a Junior Software Developer

Martin Beentjes — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 22:37:36 +0000

Hey! I am a junior software developer working with Java 8 and Spring (Boot) Framework. It has been around two/three months since I started. Time to start sharing some of my experiences of being a junior developer, and things I missed on my career start. I start this off with three tips I have for junior developers and also more experienced developers who train new juniors. Enjoy!

1) Take the first step

The first thing I failed, and still fail a bit, is taking a first step if I keep walking against a wall. When you walk against, don't walk to it a couple more times. After the first hit, ask a more experienced colleague for help.

Those small lessons when you get stuck are amazing. I found them being more helpful than necessary but it keeps the learning process alive. It speeds the learning process more.

2) Get your onboarding right!

If you are a (senior) developer who helps a new colleague get into the work: explain the whole process. Which tools do you guys use? What is your code style? What is the workflow in the source code management? How are applications being deployed? How are specifications for a piece of software formatted?

That onboarding process is so unbelievably helpful for a new colleague. I found myself in the position of wondering what to do as I did not understand the workflow used at our office.

An ideal situation would be to fill the first week with workshops for the new colleague. And let every developer give a workshop. It generates possibilities for the new developer to meet all his/her new colleagues.

Ending the workshops with a little summary would be awesome, it gives the junior a little booklet to keep by their side if needed. It depends on the knowledge level of the new developer which workshops are more important.

3) Treat each other equally and accept discussions

Even if you're a senior developer with 15+ years of experience, don't put the opinion of the junior aside and just say you're right. Explain them why you think you are right. Explain what is not correct about their opinion.

Let them discuss with you, point them to the correct direction but do not make the path for them. Make them ask you questions, but don't ignore them. Teach them the correct ways by making them think.

That is it for now

Hope people can share the same ideas, what are your thoughts on the above? I would love to hear from you!

Native or browser based applications?

Martin Beentjes — Sun, 07 May 2017 11:19:46 +0000

A lot of applications used today are based upon a browser based technology like Electron. Spotify transitioned from a native application to a browser based application. Spotify did this based upon there Microservice culture.

I have been wondering today about the need of this type of software. Do we prefer a browser based desktop application instead of a native application? If we look at Atom and Sublime Text for example. Atom is an Electron app where Sublime Text is native.

When opening big files in Atom, you really see how slow it can be. Yes it seems they are working on the speed. But Sublime Text does read big files a bit quicker.

Regarding the size of an Electron application vs a native applications, I just cloned the electron-boilerplate repository. Then I used electron-packager to build it into an executable. That thing is 125MB. That is HUGE for just a sort of Hello World application.

So far, native is winning in my opinion regarding the performance and size. Let's look at some other points.

As Electron is a browser based stack, we can working in programming language for the web. That is a plus, many web developer now can work on Desktop applications as well. So then I can make cross platform applications with just one language stack.

If I want to make a native application, I probably go with something like C++. I think that is the best option to go native and cross platform. But C++ is a language which is very hard to master. Yet, the Hello World application is not 125MB.

Then, when I would actually work on an application in C++, I need a GUI framework. That is not that big of a deal. But what I want to make a nice fancy material design GUI? Good luck with that.

So, if I take a look it is hard to decide what is better. I wanted to start this discussion, what do you prefer? Or would you leave a Desktop application a side?

Hi, I'm Martin Beentjes

Martin Beentjes — Wed, 03 May 2017 13:28:56 +0000

I have been coding for 5 years.

You can find me on Twitter as @martinbeentjes

I live in the Netherlands.

I mostly program in these languages: Java, Go, C, C#.

I am currently learning more about Go.

Nice to meet you.