Software that works.
In production.

Why I still blog in 2026

It is 2026 and I still have a blog. Not because it is cool. Not because it is trendy. Blogging stopped being fashionable years ago. I keep writing because it is one of the best ways I know to actually learn things.

TDD with an AI assistant, my perspective as a beginning practitioner

I have been practising Test-Driven Development for more than 25 years. The red-green-refactor cycle is second nature.

I have of course heard a lot about AI tools and LLMs over the last couple of years. The times I have tried them, I have not been impressed. Their proposals didn't compile. They seemed to solve the wrong problem. This was probably because they lacked the context of the project I'm working on. Honestly, a lot of what I have seen has been rubbish.

Not too long ago I saw a thread on LinkedIn where some people who I know really know what they are doing discussed their experience with AI assistants and specifically Claude Code. I decided to give it a try.

Compare time with AssertJ

AssertJ is a great assertion framework for Java. It is in my opinion much better than any of the available alternatives. Two areas where AssertJ shines are verifying collections and verifying exceptions. It is also extendable, so you can implement custom assertions for your domain objects.

The way to assert something is done using the method assertThat(). A typical example looks like this:

assertThat(actual).isEqualTo(expected);

isEqualTo() is overloaded and can be used for a lot of comparisons.