My Deliberate Practice Journey - month 2
Tags: practice
Published: 2020-06-10 19:35:58

---
title: My Deliberate Practice Journey - month 2
published: true
description: 
tags: [practice]
---

Month 2 on my journey in practicing programming deliberately. This past month I got to work with [quarkus](www.quarkus.io) a lit bit more and with [spring boot](https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot).

Quarkus really feels very comfortable if you are experienced in the JEE world. The community really seems very active. There's a new version I still have to test.
I started my project using the yasson serializer for JSON. Things didn't go so well. I changed to jackson, and everything started to look better. The [jackson](https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson) ability to choose if a property is read only or write only is really useful. I was also able to integrate open api and swagger ui and create a really nice documentation for my project.
It sure is something I will try to use more from now on.

You can read a post about it [here](https://dev.to/kgoedert/jackson-readonly-properties-and-swagger-ui-3kfg).

I was also able to spend some time writing integrated tests. And the database part of it is still painful. I cannot see a lot of value using a database for testing that is not the same one used in production as so many seem to recommend. I tried using [test containers](https://www.testcontainers.org/), and it seems to work well. But since I am working alone, and exploring test containers can become part of my studies, I can create another database for testing without major problems. In a bigger team, where it developer may need one database to test, it can come in handy.

Since I had all this setup made with quarkus, I took a detour and created another little project to help me on my language learning. A popular tool among people that learn languages is [anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) where you can create your own flashcards and work with spaced repetion. I decided to add some audio to my cards, and used [voice RSS](http://www.voicerss.org/default.aspx) for that which as text to speech API. If you would like to check the project, it is [here](https://github.com/kgoedert/sentence-mining-quarkus).

On the spring boot side, the project I worked on was with a friend, since the code is not mine, there is no link on github.
There were no technical challenges on the project, so there is not much to talk about.

I am still using [VSCode](https://code.visualstudio.com/) as my primary editor for development, but something buggy seems to be happening with test classes. Code completion is too slow. The discovery of the methods annotated with tests, that with the test plugin enabled should show a link over the method name to be able to run the test, is also very slow. To the point that I almost gave up on it. Some tickets seem to be open on github concerning these issues.

This reminded me of how important it is to feel productive with the tools you are using. I don't have much time to devote to this practice, if a part of this time is spent fighting with my tools... it is really a waste of time and does not help with the motivation part of things at all.

Also, two people got inspired by the previous post, and started something similiar. Hope that are enjoying and learning as much as I am. One of them even asked for some mentoring. Super cool, to be able to share what you learned.

If you would like to check what I worked on, comment on it, suggest some improvement, it is [here](https://github.com/kgoedert/hello-quarkus/tree/practice-3).