Writing quality code takes practice. To write better code, you need to know what should improve. Code quality and what makes code easy to read are very subjective; ask five different developers, you will get six different answers. For this post, I’ll avoid most of the subjective and focus on ways to detect real issues and potential bugs. I wrote some intentionally bad code to demo these tools (which was harder than you might think)....

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Apache Maven is still the most popular build tool in the Java space, thanks to the popularity of its ecosystem of plugins. It’s easy to find an existing plugin to do almost anything your application needs, from ensuring your source files have license headers, to validating binary compatibility between versions. Occasionally though, you need to write a custom plugin to fulfill a requirement in your product. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how...

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