Tom Hombergs

Tom Hombergs

As a professional software engineer, consultant, architect, general problem solver, I've been practicing the software craft for more than fifteen years and I'm still learning something new every day. I love sharing the things I learned, so you (and future me) can get a head start. That's why I founded reflectoring.io.

Articles by Tom Hombergs

Testing Time-Based Features with Feature Flags

Time-based features in a software application are a pain to test. To test such a feature, you can (and should) write unit tests, of course.

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Feature Flags: Make or Buy?

According to Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group, software delivery performance influences organizational performance in general. That means if you’re good at delivering software, you’re good at business.

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Tracing with Spring Boot, OpenTelemetry, and Jaeger

In a distributed system, many services can be involved in creating a response to a single request. Not only for debugging purposes it’s essential that the path of such a request can be traced through all involved services.

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Reflectoring Review 2021 - Growing Slowly

It’s the time of the year again when I reflect about the Reflectoring year (pun intended). In this article, I share a bit about my successes and failures as a creator of code, text, and (coming up) a SaaS product.

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Be Scrappy, Not Crappy

It’s not so long ago that I learned the term “scrappy”. Someone was looking to build a “scrappy” team of software engineers to build the next big thing, and build it fast.

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Feature Flags with Spring Boot

Feature flags are a great tool to improve confidence in deployments and to avoid impacting customers with unintended changes. Instead of deploying a new feature directly to production, we “hide” it behind an if/else statement in our code that evaluates a feature flag.

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