Introduction Welcome to another one of my database-centric articles. This time, although all examples will be written in Java, the topic at hand is so generic and universal, it can be applied to any programming language that utilizes any Database Abstraction library that can be called an ORM .  Be it Java with Hibernate, PHP with its Doctrine or Ruby with Active Record.  Modern Application Architecture has drifted away from layered Monoliths to more flexible and manageable micro-services that utilize Hexagonal approach. Even if you didn't jump into the micro-services train, the focus these days tends to be on good modularization, vertical slicing and defining proper Bounded Contexts and Aggregate Roots within the Business Domain of the developed Product. But does it mean, that a Service or a Module can just be a bag of poorly structured, interconnected Classes with no proper, repeatable and meaningful naming, packaging and responsibilities? Can we, even when using DDD, C...

 Introduction Welcome to another installment of "Tech Aside" series, where I focus on non-technical areas that are a part of Software Developers' world. Were you drawn here by a somewhat provocative title of the article? I've chosen it in small part because it is kinda clickbaity, but for the most part because during 2019 Devoxx Conference there was this great lecture performed by James Birnie , and it had the exact same title. I strongly encourage you to watch it (no actual engineering knowledge required), as it's a great talk and it will give you some context to what I'm about to share here.   This article may very well turn out to the most personal entry on this Blog, so if you're not that interested in a bit of my story, thoughts and reflections, feel free to skip it :) Who was I? When I've entered the IT Job Market back in 2010, things were very different from what they are today. I came from a small town in Poland and graduated not-so-prestigious...

 Introduction Welcome to the first installment of the new series called 'Tech Aside'. It will group all articles where I focus on various non-technical aspects of my work.    I hope you'll agree that the key to a successful career in Software Development  is not only having  sound technical and analytical skills, but also possessing strong soft skills. We need to be able to work in a team, to organize our work, to communicate with team members, users and all the other people around us. To express our fears, our goals, our approach to solving problems. To be able to provide feedback, to explain technical aspects to non-technical folks, to defend our estimates and decisions against the deadline pressure. Our work is not placed in a vacuum. Deep understanding of the business context we're in and the ability to work collectively are fundamental to our success as Software Developers and/or Engineers. In the end, we need to be able to deliver and not antagonize everyo...

 Introduction  Hibernate offers a convenient abstraction layer over most of the common CRUD SQL operations. Combining it further with Spring Data JPA makes us feel that we have this huge and important part of our development covered by simple Interfaces and APIs. Sooner or later however we will be faced with a requirement that will force us to dig deeper into the SQL handbook and come up with a Query that is not supported by JPA/Hibernate. We then will be thrown into the not so pleasant world of calling Native SQL. Convenient until it's not JPA's support for calling Native Queries is not friendly at all. You are required to abandon all of your Java abstraction layers and naming conventions, and simply provide a Native SQL Query in a String. Anyone who needed to code anything using Strings knows how fun it is, even with IDE's support. Let's set a realistic example to work with. Suppose we have an online book store and we keep our book entries using the following simple E...