Zero Trust; you’ve probably, at the very least, heard of the term. Some may have worked on a project where a Zero Trust policy was in effect, and others may well be working for a company with a company wide Zero Trust policy in effect. But do you know what Zero Trust actually entails? And if you know, do you know how best to develop software that has to comply to a Zero Trust policy?

Depending on your level of exposure to Zero Trust, you may well have had a bad experience with it, may not want to have anything to do with it, or may not want to develop in such an environment at all. If you had a bad experience, it is most likely due to the company or project not understanding the Zero Trust methodology and implementing it incorrectly; but that is a subject for different blog post. Regardless of your experience with (or opinion of) Zero Trust, this post will give you some helpful hints on how to best develop for a Zero Trust environment.

Spring Security provides a lot of convenience to develop secure web applications. However, it relies strongly on a SecurityContext stored in a thread-local (inside the SecurityContextHolder class). If not mitigated, this causes issues in multi-threaded contexts. When using Kotlin Coroutines, there is an additional abstraction layer where you don’t really know (and don’t want to know) on which thread(s) your code will be running. Luckily, there is a relatively easy solution!

In my last blog How tech culture can contribute to quality I focused on how passion and motivation builds a tech culture. This helps people develop themselves in a positive way while organisations are more successful in delivering high quality solutions. So basically everyone wins. In this post I want to dive into how we can help educate the community in a way that they understand not only what to do with certain knowledge, but also why things work in a specific way.

Amazon Web Services offers a way to connect to a MySQL or PostgreSQL database without having a password, instead an authentication token can be used.
Within AWS this type of authentication is called RDS IAM.
Users don’t need to store an username and password and credentials don’t need to be stored in the database, which makes this a secure authentication method.

So, this makes it interesting to use this in your Spring Boot application. Spring Boot will use a HikariCP connection pool by default, but HikariCP 4.0.3 doesn’t support the use of authentication tokens.

So, how do I make this work within my Spring Boot application?

Robot Framework is easy enough to set up. When you have Python installed on your system, it can be as easy as running pip install robotframework && pip install robotframework-appiumlibrary. This is not how I want to do it. For this intro, I want to run the Robot Framework in a Docker image.

Apache Kafka is often used together with Confluent Schema Registry, as the schema registry allows you to store and retrieve your Avro, JSON Schema and Protobuf schemas for Kafka message (de)serialization. By storing a versioned history of schemas for topic values, with configurable enforced compatibility, you ensure producers and consumers can continue to exchange compact serialized messages even as schemas evolve.

How would you like to use your favorite backend language to develop frontend? In this blogpost I’ll show you how to compile a small kotlin example to WebAssembly and how to run the output in your browser.

Struggling with merging multiple repositories together into one (mono) repository? You wanna preserve your valuable git history?

This blogpost will show you how to do this step-by-step.

If we have an Optional instance we can consume the value if it is present using the ifPresent method. Since Java 9 the method ifPresentOrElse has been added to the Optional class. The first argument is of type Consumer and is invoked when there is an optional value. The second argument is of type Runnable and is executed when the the optional is empty. The method in the Consumer and Runnable implementations does not return a type but returns void. Therefore we should use ifPresentOrElse when we need a conditional side effect for an Optional instance.

In the following example we have a method handleName that will update a list if an optional value is present or increases a counter when the optional value is empty:

In the clojure.set namespace we can find the function map-invert. This function returns a new map where the values are keys with the appropriates keys of the original map assigned as value. If the original map has duplicate values than the latest key for the duplicate value will be the value of the new key.

In the following example code we see the result of using map-invert: