A week has gone by now since Haystack 2024 EU took place in Berlin. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend in person, but as the organizers made it available to join the sessions remotely, I happily marked the days in the calendar, eager to listen about the latest innovations in information retrieval and case studies from fellow search engineers. Read on for a quick summary of conference.

Property-based testing is a powerful test methodology that is a useful addition to a developer's portfolio. ScalaCheck brings property-based testing to the Java platform. In this article, we explore what property-based testing is, how it differs from traditional unit testing and how it can be integrated into your own test base.

Reasoning about the performance of a system is a rather tedious and complex task. A microscopic approach would suggest that you construct a model that factors in various components, such as the load and utilization of resources like CPU and I/O when certain code paths are executed. This can get complicated very quickly. Looking at the system's performance as a whole oftentimes suffices to achieve a general understanding of its behavior. Therefore, we propose to follow a pragmatic approach by looking at the system from a macroscopic perspective.