This is the personal blog of Johannes Brodwall where I write about programming in Java, JavaScript, C# and about Agile Software development. I try to think inside a bigger box Who am I? My salary gets paid by Sopra Steria, Norway’s largest IT consultancy. I’m called a “principal software engineer” s...

Resurrected! If you’re reading this, and you have visited my blog before, you are probably noticing changes. My blog was suffering from technical debt for years and I finally dealt with it. When I addressed the technical problems of my blog, I wanted to make something that could last without me putt...

This site under construction I had a failure scenario with WordPress and PHP versions. As I think a static site should be created statically, I’ve decided to export the current content and create a new web site with Hugo.

(Technically, this is a blogpost about Oauth2 and not OpenID Connect) Are you using Slack as a central communication tool? Did you know that you can also use it as your identity provider for other apps you make or buy? For informal organizations like user groups and volunteer based conferences, Slac...

The advantage of OpenID Connect is the fact that it’s standardized and widely adopted. This means that a library or tool designed to work with, e.g. Google accounts, can easily be adopted to work with e.g. Microsoft’s Active Directory or the Norwegian national ID provider ID-porten. Different Identi...

The advantage of OpenID Connect is the fact that it’s standardized and widely adopted. This means that a library or tool designed to work with, e.g. Google accounts, can easily be adopted to work with e.g. Microsoft’s Active Directory or the Norwegian national ID provider ID-porten. Different Identi...

This Norwegian language blog post summarizes my talk at Oslo Agile Meetup in the beginning of October. Jeg tror ingen egentlig vet hvordan de skal få til bra utviklingsprosjektet. Selv når vi lykkes så er det veldig mye flaks. De fleste av oss tror vi kunne gjort mye bedre. For de fleste av oss hold...

Lately I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to fall into the trap of not challenging our ideas about the code we’re working on. In order to challenge the default mindset of Clean Code, I recently proposed to institute Dirty Code Monday (a proposal that sort of got me into a bit of a big discussio...

I recently did a few days of TDD training for a client. They asked me to help them test and refactor a class that created XML from an internal domain model. This gave me the opportunity to examine a bigger pattern. I wondered where the domain model came from. Looking through the code base, I found t...

My previous blog post took off on Twitter. It pointed out a problem: Insisting on the obligation to follow certain rules at all times isn’t actually helping people work better. The most common question (or objection) I got to the blog post was: So how do we teach new coders how to code well. This bl...

When your heroes start acting weird, you reexamine their influence on your life. I’ve long been learning, demonstrating and teaching clean code through TDD, patterns and so on. But when I look back, I am now worried that the ideas negatively influence my life and my work and that of others. Many who...

På grunn av sykdom ble intervjuet med mellom meg og Robert Steen 1. juni flyttet. Du kan istedet se oss live førstkommende fredag 22. juni. Jeg ble først oppmerksom på finansbyråd Robert Steen når vi ba ham om å holde åpningsinnlegg på Dataforeningens Software 2018. Som han selv sa på scenen: Å invi...

For nesten nøyaktig tre uker siden var jeg så heldig at jeg fikk lov å sette meg ned med Torbjørn Larsen, IT-direktøren i NAV og prate med ham på video om hvordan man fornyer en stor offentlig virksomhet. NAV har de siste årene blitt et av de mest ettertraktede fagmiljøene for IT-folk og jeg tror de...

I’ve long time been a critic of the mechanism of compiler checked exceptions in Java. Whether you love them or hate then, one thing is sure: There’s situations where you don’t want to have to deal with them. The solution in Java is to wrap a checked exception in new RuntimeException(e) but this give...

As the year comes to an end, I describe some gloomy clouds in our future. This Norwegian language article was first published on the web site of the Norwegian Computing Association. Hvilken fremtid overlater vi til våre barn og barnebarn? Endringstakten i samfunnet ser ikke ut til å sakke ned og en ...

To avoid the big problems with projects, everybody recommends risk management. At the same time, I’ve rarely seen risk management practiced effectively. Do we identify the same risks and do we actually prepare to handle them? The ironic thing is that I think most projects have the same top four risk...

Recently, my organization reached a big goal and we decided to celebrate by taking everyone out for dinner. What happened was a GDPR nightmare. Or was it? We sent out a Google Form with three simple questions: 1. What’s your name, 2. Are you coming to the dinner? 3. Do you have any dietary constrain...

We’re running Mobile Era for the second year on October 5th-6th and I’d like to share some experience on how we’re using scripts and Trello to help with the organization effort. If you’d like automating simple tools, this is the article for you. If you haven’t signed up for Mobile Era yet, you can l...

If you are working with software development as a developer, manager or tester, then you will be impacted by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – the new EU laws regarding data privacy. In many ways, the regulation is likely to have as big of an impact as the Y2K problem. But this time ...

Trailblazing the first delivery of a software system requires courage and conviction, especially on projects that replace existing business critical software. When I’ve been acting as system architect I’ve employed a number of tricks in order to structure functionality and technical solutions in...

On the futility of understanding Is true understanding actually possible? I use my fingers to tap out keys on a keyboard and the light from your screen hits our eyeballs, but is it reasonable to think that there is any correspondence between the patterns in my brain and the patterns that were just c...

So: What is best? A native app or a hybrid app? And if you build a hybrid app, what’s the best framework to use? As with most interesting questions, it turns out that the answer is “it depends”. I often get questions like “isn’t Xamarin (or Cordova) better than build a native app”. Weeeell, it’s not...

(Looks like I’m back in the conference organization game again! After a few years of lots of travel and then a few years of lots of family responsibilities, this year I co-funded the Mobile Era conference. It looks like it will be a blast!) If your experience is anything like mine, most of the inter...

At JavaZone this year, I gave the talk “Computer Vision for mobile Java developers”. Here, I live code finding conference badges in a picture. The coding is iterative and interactive and I use it to illustrate Haar cascades, Canny edge detection, Otsu thresholding, contour detection, erosion and dil...

Er det noen som sammenligner omfang og kostnad på IT prosjekter i Norge? Jeg tror man kunne få noen interessante innsikter dersom man gjorde dette riktig. (Jeg må unnskylde at teksten i denne blogposten blir litt vag - jeg ønsker å si så lite som mulig om de aktuelle prosjektene for å unngå å ekspon...

Man kan lese fra moderne tanker på IT-utvikling at prosjekter er en avleggs arbeidsform. For de som har erfaring med utviklingsaktiviteter innen offentlig og privat sektor kan dette virke som en rar påstand. De aller fleste ser behovet for å unngå store prosjekter, men er prosjektet som arbeidsform ...

As programmers, we have long learned that Duplication is the Ultimate Sin of programming. Even considering to duplicate something is almost unthinkable. But removing duplication introduces dependencies. If you and I use the reuse the same piece of code instead of duplicating it, changes I make may a...

I was humbled and encouraged to learn that I was nominated for Nordic Startup Awards category of Developer Hero for my contributions to the developer community. You can vote for me or one of the other great candidates here. For the last ten years, I have felt that the main pain points of the softwar...

I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 3 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. In order to get a handle on how to build a feature for your next iteration, take a trip with your time machine to the future to watch how the feature...

I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 2 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. This is a trick that I learned from my User Experience (UX) friends. In many projects, the project members have a great feeling about the possibiliti...