My name is Marcin Świerczyński. I'm a software developer especially interested in Java and Python languages, Java-based technologies and mobile applications development.
I'll be writing here about interesting issues I faced during my programming adventures. I hope you'll find the solutions useful.
posted 27 Mar 2023
Airly Alexa Skill Some time ago I wrote a skill for Alexa fetching current air pollution data from Airly - the air pollution service popular in Poland. The skill is very simple - one says “Alexa, open air quality” and it replies something like “Great air here today! The Common Air Quality Index is 12”. I wrote it in Java - event it’s not the best choice for AWS Lambda - because why not? :)...
posted 12 Mar 2016
What are we going to do? In this post we’re going to prepare a Spring Boot application to work under Docker. Then, we’ll publish our app image to DockerHub. Prerequisites Docker We’ll need a Docker installed on a local machine. To run Docker on machine running under different system than Linux, we’ll also need VirtualBox installed. Nice introduction on how to set up Docker on different operating systems is available on Docker’s site. To make...
posted 25 Jan 2013
What is it all about? Recently, I wanted to provide a strong password hashing in a plain Java application. I decided to use Apache Shiro. As Apache Shiro’s website says: Apache Shiro is a powerful and easy-to-use Java security framework that performs authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management. Shiro is very powerful and provides all-in-one security solution. For instance, it can communicate with a persistence layer directly, so you don’t need to take care of...
posted 11 Nov 2012
Recently, I started MongoDB for Developers course from 10gen Education. The third week brought some very interesting information on schema design. I decided to write it down here for further reference but I hope it will also be useful for others. MongoDB limitations MongoDB do not provide foreign key constraints known from relational databases. How can we deal with it? Well, one option is embedding. If you don’t separate documents into a few collections but...
posted 08 Nov 2012
A few days ago I finished Functional Programming Principles in Scala course by Martin Odersky and Coursera. I just wanted to share my thoughts on it, since it took quite a bit of my time during last seven weeks. Goal My goal was to get a taste of functional programming which I had a very little contact with before. Also, I wanted to polish my Scala skills, because I’m still learning it. Was the plan...
posted 07 Jun 2012
Some time ago I recorded a short screencast describing how to configure Play! Framework 1.2.4 with IntelliJ IDEA 11. The point was to promote the framework and to get some experience in screencasts recording :) I’m aware it’s a bit outdated now, since Play! 2 has been released. However, I decided to publish it. I hope somebody make a use of it!
posted 15 Apr 2012
Thanks to O’Reilly Blogger Review Program I was recently able to read Code Simplicity by Max Kanat-Alexander. First of all, I have to admit I was confused by the title. I thought that the book will be about, well, coding. But it isn’t - in the whole text there is almost no code at all! Instead, on a first few pages, you can read that the book is about a design. But again, if you,...
posted 12 Feb 2012
It was almost a year ago when I had a pleasure to review Mastering Git by Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund. Today, thanks to O’Reilly, I can take a look at its successor - Mastering Advanced Git. Just as a reminder: I really liked the first part. But I simply loved the new one! It covers Git details in very thorough way. And, what is perhaps even more important, it leads you through them in...
posted 07 Jan 2012
The purpose of this article is to show how quickly and easily deploy Grails application to Cloud Foundry platform. What is Cloud Foundry? From cloudfoundry.com: Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Initiated by VMware, with broad industry support, Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. It is an open source project and is available through...
posted 05 Mar 2011
On the beginning, I just want to say one thing - McCullough and Berglund on Mastering Git is a perfect way to learn Git! The only requirement is an ability to learn in a classroom-type environment. An impression of class or conference is maximized by the fact that “students” are asking questions. If you’re able to learn from a lecture, keep reading! This video provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to efficiently use Git...