Photo by Allie on Unsplash This post is part 2 of this series. Part 1 can be found here. Recently the company I worked for laid off all its employees. Before I go further, I think its worth laying down the context. The company was doing some innovative work in the Fintech SaaS space within Australia/New Zealand and was in various stages between demo to about to sign a contract stage with various companies.

If you’ve been spring boot for a while, you’re probably familiar with Spring’s bootJar functionality that lets you create a new executable “fat jar” with all its dependencies pre defined. However, while I was building a kotlin app using http4k, which doesn’t come with any such built in tooling I had to resort to using the shadowJar plugin to build a fat jar. However post deploy, the app stopped starting up and I noticed the following error in the logs:

This post is part 1 of this series. Part 2 can be found here. Ever since the coronavirus started taking its hold around the communities and economies of the world - it has had a profound impact on everyone. As a result, everyone has had to adapt to this harsh new reality. With all that in mind, I thought it might be worthwhile documenting everything that is going around in my head.

List of Goals for 2020 This is my personal tracking list for goals I have set for myself in 2020 to keep myself accountable. Publish 20 blog posts This is my top goal for 2020. I have always enjoyed writing and reading through David Perrels’ blog and Paul Grahams’ essays has renewed my drive to publish as much content as I can this year. It’s going to be hard as I have several professional and personal milestones to reach this year.

For many software engineers, SE job titles hold a special place. No other topic elicits a more passionate response than when an engineer thinks that their ranking in the pecking order is threatened by an unworthy usurper in their company. The pattern is the same, whether it be a 1000+ tech drone corporate or small tight-knit startup. Although initially used to define various steps in the career ladder which meant more prestige from the colleagues and more importantly, better compensation from the employer - the ranks have warped into a pissing contest between new developers in the industry.