A Java geek

Before being software developers, we are people - and thus creatures of habits. It’s hard for someone to change one’s own habits, it’s harder for someone to change someone else’s habits - and for some of us, it’s even harder. This, week, during a code review, I stumbled upon this kind of structure.

When one thinks about hosting one’s Git repository online, one’s first choice is just Github, no questions asked. It’s so successful that it has become the de facto standard of Git solutions in the cloud. It’s so well-entrenched that developers are advised to use it as their portfolio. At first glance, Github has it all: public repositories, group collaboration, metrics, page hosting, on-premise install option, etc.

This week, I tried to improve my pet Android application developed in Kotlin. As I was very new to Kotlin when I started it, most of the code just looks like Java written in Kotlin. I will start simply.

Last week, a colleague pointed out to my team an online developer recruitment challenge. As I find it fun and there was no need to disclose one’s email, I decided to try, just to check if I could to it. The problem is quite simple but not easy: consider a rectangular maze of finite size. One has to find a specific cell on the board - the exit, starting from the origin. One has 2 move options: one cell at a time in one of the 4 cardinal points or jumping to any previously visited cell.

Since about a year and a half, I do a lot of presentations on Mutation Testing. In those, my point is to show that Code Coverage’s only benefit is that it’s easy to compute but that it’s meaningless - hence Mutation Testing. Since some time, I’ve been interested in Kotlin, a language from JetBrains that runs on the JVM. It’s only natural that I wanted to check how Mutation Testing could be applied to the Kotlin language.