Hi there,

I'm Nikolas Martens, freelancing Software Engineer, and this is my blog. I hope it contains something interesting for you. Enjoy the read!

Essential Complexity is Essential

Thu 11 May 2017 in programming

(This article was featured on the blog of the International PHP Conference)

The premise of my talk "Rapid Prototyping with Domain-Driven Design" is that the two greatest foes of every software developer are a) uncertainty and b) complexity. Over the years, we have invented many tools and methods to fight …

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Science-Driven Development

Mon 14 December 2015 in programming

Ever once in a while everything seems to fall into place and suddenly the connection between previously unconnected dots becomes obvious. During the last couple of days, I've had such a moment. In this article I describe the reasoning behind my conclusion that The Lean Start-Up, Agile Development, Specification by …

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Building web applications with watoki

Thu 05 March 2015 in programming

I've been working for about a year now on a project named web application tool kit (short watoki) and thought if I ever want anybody besides me to use it, I better write about how.

watoki a collection of libraries that provide infrastructure commonly needed by …

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Tool Tyranny

Wed 15 October 2014 in programming

So Richard McIntyre (aka mackstar) created a BDD tool named ShouldIT (video) which led to a discussion between him and Konstantin Kudryashov (aka everzet), mostly comparing ShouldIT to Cucumber/Behat. For example in this gist.

Guess I'm jumping kinda late on the bandwagon here but I wanted to add my …

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Specification by Example

Thu 11 September 2014 in programming

In a previous post I argued against a testing monoculture and suggested to mix tests with different levels of integration. Since UI tests cannot test the system completey, but unit tests are often times too fine-grained to justify their investment, staying away from these extremes is often times the best …

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