Database Denormalization: Boosting Performance, Managing Trade-offs, and Best Practices for Implementation

Every database purist has a moment of crisis when they consider denormalizing perfectly clean, 3NF-compliant data. We spend so much time in university or reading blog posts being told “Don’t Repeat Yourself” or “No duplication in the database!” that the very thought can feel like sacrilege. Yet here we are, about to talk about intentionally... Continue reading

Merging Old-School OOP with Dataflow: The Awesome Visitor + Pipe-and-Filter Mashup

Ever wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “I love reading about design patterns, but do we really need more ways to pass data around?” No? Well, if you’re still here, you probably enjoy borderline masochistic discussions about code architecture as much as I do. Today, we’ll look at two seemingly unrelated design... Continue reading

Taming the Optional Beast When Interfacing Between Java and Kotlin – Without Losing Your Sanity or Null Safety

So you’ve got a Kotlin codebase that you love more than your morning coffee, and yet there’s still that pesky legacy Java component that’s holding on for dear life. Somewhere in there is Optional<T> – Java’s fancy way of saying “maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not,” which Kotlin takes very, very personally. If you’ve ever... Continue reading