Category: Programming

As a programmer we don’t really like to deal with errors. We like to focus on the happy path – the one that provides value – and deal with the errors later because … well, we have to do it!

However dealing with failures is crucial if we don’t want our program to stop on the first error it encounters.

But still we don’t want to mix the “clean” code of the happy path with the “dirty” error handling code. And in fact this is what exceptions were suppose to bring: A clean happy path in a try statement and the error handling code in a catch statement. You know everything clean and separated.

In Scala we have a rich type-system which gives us more options to handle errors. But before we start let’s be clear by what we mean by errors. Continue reading “Dealing with errors”

We all know we should write tests to make sure our system behaves as it is supposed to.

Surely tests are necessary to ensure correctness of our programs but they only depend on what the programmer is willing to test (or can think of testing).

What I mean is that there will always be gaps in the test coverage, like uncovered corner cases or improbable combinations of events, …

In Scala we have a powerful type system that we can use to help us avoid some mistakes.

Why would you bother writing a test to make sure a function handle some corner cases correctly when you can use the type system to make sure such cases won’t ever happen. Continue reading “Leveraging the type system to avoid mistakes”

Type refinement is all about making the types more precise. But why would do that? Because using the correct types makes your program safer as you reduce the possibility to introduce bugs.

First let’s think about types. For instance String is a type we use all the time. A variable of type String can have many different values (in theory an infinity of values) but it’s quite unlikely that all these values make sense in our application. Continue reading “Refined types, what are they good for?”

In this previous post we’ve seen that before using Scala’s Future it might be worth taking some time to think of the use cases (especially error cases), the execution model we need, … as it might be more advantageous to choose a solution like Monix’s Task (although not available in standard library) to gain finer control over the execution. However some might not be able to make a decision at this stage and like to keep their options open. Let’s see how we can revisit our product repository in such way that we don’t have to make a decision too early.
Continue reading “Introduction to Tagless final”

In this previous post we saw how Scala Futures work and why they need an implicit ExecutionContext to run their computation. While there is some trick to pass the ExecutionContext, it’s usually cumbersome and clutter the code.

So the question really is: Do you need an ExecutionContext everywhere? Well, you do as long as you use Futures, but is there any alternatives? Continue reading “Scala Futures vs Monix Tasks”

Akka actors fits nicely with DDD (Domain Driven Design) to design an application. E.g. It’s quite natural to model entities as individual actors who can be persisted, …

One of the key aspect in DDD is the notion of bounded context. A bounded context is simply a “self-content” component. It can interact with other components but it is coherent on its own. Each bounded context has its own domain model which belongs only to itself and should not leaked or be influenced by other bounded context.

Anti-corruption layers (aka translation layers or adapter layers) are used to enforce this principle. Basically their role is to translate the core domain objects into/from another domain that is used for communication or persistence.

In this blog post we’re going to try to follow the DDD principles to build a small (contrived) application using Akka and try to figure out the best way to build efficient anticorruption layers. Continue reading “Building anti-corruption layers with Akka”