java – Techno Wizardry

Best Practices for Java testing with JUnit

JUnit is a popular testing library for Java applications and I extensively used it when working at Amazon for the numerous Java applications and services there. However, I came across a number of different anti-patterns and areas to improve the quality of the test code. This post introduces many of the different tricks and patterns that I’ve learned and shared with my coworkers, and now want to share

Another library to know and reference is Mockito, which I use extensively in JUnit test cases and will reference this too below.

These are all real things that I’ve seen developers do.

Best Practices for working with Google Guice

Google Guice is a dependency injection library for Java and I frequently used it on a number of Java services. Compared to Spring, I liked how simple and narrow focused on just dependency injection it was. However, I often times saw developers using it in incorrect or non-ideal patterns that increased boilerplate or were just wrong.

These are all recommendations that I’ve accumulated over several years at working at Amazon watching engineers and sometimes myself improperly leverage Google Guice.

Defensive Coding: Stop using your storage models everywhere

How to make your system robust against your worst nightmare–your future self

In this post, I talk about some strategies that I’ve learned to simplify class structures in Java services that load and persist data into data stores like DynamoDB or RDS at the same time making the codebase safer.

As always, my opinions are my own.

At Amazon, I ended up joining two teams that were suffering under the technical debt. Each time, I was asked to spend some time understanding why the products were unstable and users were encountering frequent bugs. In one system, responsible for managing critical metadata about products in the catalog, was experiencing problems where users were reporting that they’d randomly lose data.

A service that was losing client data is a terrible service and caused users to lose trust in this system. Note that some details of this story have been modified for confidentiality reasons. Let’s dive in.