• Understand how to improve performance with your Java code using Java 8 language features.
• Learn hands on techniques to discover and implement common Java 8 refactorings.
• Understand when you should and should not apply key refactorings in Java 8.

A hastily thrown-together list of some of the places to get more information on how to write performant code.

And now, after an absence of several weeks, you get to see how long it takes me to write some of these posts.

I was putting up the Christmas decorations one Saturday when my worst fear was realised¹ - one of my three strings of lights was not working.

The first two went up fine. The third lit up when I plugged it in, and in less than a second went out. Curses. This is not what I wanted, this was supposed to be a short exercise in making my tiny little flat look festive.

So I set about the tedious task of starting from the end closest to the plug and replacing every bulb, one by one, with a spare one to see if it magically lit up again. When it doesn’t, you take the spare back out and replace it with the original bulb. I remember my parents going through this ritual every Christmas, the tediousness of this activity is more memorable than the fleeting joy of shinies.