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Benedict Egima Ayiko

10 years from now, you will regret more the things you didn't do than those you did

Senior Software Developer @Andela, Senior Backend Engineer @Coursera

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A Simple Guide for Java.util.Date

18 Feb 2019
In this article, we will explore java.util.Date, consume it as a basic cheatsheet. We will see several examples as it's still used in several code bases and later, I mean really later, we will conspire to throw it out of the window and explore better alternatives for date and time handling in Java.

Java Garbage Collector and Reference Objects

07 Feb 2017
We take a look at garbage collector concepts in Java and that various reference object types that can be handled by it, demystifying the Java GC!

In this article, we will discuss a few memory management concepts in Java with a heavy focus on the interaction between the Garbage Collector and the different reference objects available.

This is no introduction, so let us mutually agree that you have Java Heap and GC basics down. Many articles cover this topic quite well, and you might actually wonder why am covering something that is already well discussed over the www.

Lambda Expressions in Java 8

30 Jan 2017
In this post, we will learn what, exactly, lambda expressions are and how they fit into the whole Java ecosystem.

Lambda expressions are the most popular feature of Java 8. They introduce functional programming concepts to Java, which is a completely object-oriented and imperative programming language.

How functional programming languages work is beyond the scope of this article, but we will extract a feature that will make the difference obvious for us who work with OOP.

Java Method References

18 Jan 2017
A double colon might appear so innocently, but there's a lot of things to know about it. In this post, we try to put together the most important of them.

In this post, we are going to discuss yet another feature of Java 8: Method References. In a previous post, we explored lambda expressions and learned how to use them to write better and more compact Java code, especially with the advent of functional interfaces.

Unless you are very well-versed with lambda expressions, I would highly recommend that you first go through my lambda expressions tutorial before continuing with this post.

To even encourage you further, when you understand lambda expressions, method references are a walk over.

Getting The Most Out of HashMaps

10 Jan 2017
HashMaps are a great tool, but you need to know the internals to get the best performance from them. This guide covers collisions, iterations, load factors, and more.

HashMap is perhaps the most popular implementation of the Map interface in Java Collections Framework (JCF). If you want to fully understand the internal workings of HashMap, the best tutorial I have found online is here.

For this article, we are only going to focus on the performance specific concepts. HashMap offers us a very fast, well-optimized data structure solution for many problem scenarios.