Blogs

This blog post was originally posted here on the alvinalexander.com website.

I was just updating my Example UML Use Case diagram article and it occurred to me that if you're a Business Analyst, there are a couple of questions you can ask yourself as you write a Use Case (or User Story) that will help improve the quality of your writing.

This blog post was originally posted here on the alvinalexander.com website.

When it comes to working as a business analyst, I’ve learned that there are just three things you need to keep in your mind when meeting with your customers (the project sponsor (gold owner) and domain experts (“goal donors”)) to gather requirements. These three thoughts will keep your meeting on track, lead you to the next question, and will help you know when your work is done.

I needed to test a web application recently, so I started using Selenium again. This time I decided to use Selenium with Scala, and Scala 3 and ScalaTest in particular.

Because Scala can generally use Java libraries very easily, this was a quick and easy setup. I just configured sbt as usual, and then started creating my Selenium tests with Scala 3 and ScalaTest.

Here in mid-September 11, 2021, I’m glad to report that the 2021 Scala Cookbook is an Amazon best-selling new release in both their object-oriented programming (OOP) and functional programming (FP) categories, and it’s been a best-seller going on almost four weeks now:

I was away from Twitter for a little while, but last night I saw that Salar Rahmanian has started a newsletter. In his first edition he mentions the Functional Programming, Simplified book, which is pretty cool. His discussion of blogging platforms is also interesting, and I liked his introduction to ZIO actors, as well. Kudos.

As a brief note to self, here’s some Java source code for a little Android project that kind of strips things down so I can focus on how to get Android location information with the Fused Location Provider API:

An interesting thing I ran into today when using mixed Kotlin and Java code on an Android project is that if you want to declare constants in a Kotlin object, you’ll either want to do this:

object Constants {

    @JvmField internal val UPDATE_INTERVAL_IN_MILLISECONDS: Long = 10000
    @JvmField internal val REQUEST_CHECK_SETTINGS = 100
    @JvmField internal val last_known_location = "last_known_location"

}

or this:

As a brief note today, I started using Kotlin for Android development in 2018, and I’ve enjoyed it so much I started writing a new book that I called, Kotlin Quick Reference, which you can find online at that link.

No telling if I’ll ever need this again, but this weekend I was helping someone with some Scala Spark work, and the short version of the story is that they were ending up with null values in their data after creating a Spark join. The null values were ending up in two fields, one named balance and another named accountId, so I created these two Spark udf functions to fix the data, converting null values into Long in the first example, and null values into empty strings in the second example:

As a brief note to self, this is a short list of useful, basic Docker commands that I just used while getting some Docker containers up and running: