sebastiandaschner news

Welcome to newsletter #46!

Now this unusual year 2020 slowly goes to an end, and I have one more newsletter with some Christmas specials :)

I hope you’re all in good health, could use the time in that different year well, and I hope that I can see some of you in 2021.

What’s new

Implementing an undo feature with Neo4J

In this Christmas special video, I’m showing how to implement an undo feature in a Quarkus application with a Neo4J database. From a user perspective, an undo action might look little spectacular, but once you know what needs to be taken into account on a database side, it’s everything but trivial. Especially in graph databases, we need to take the relationships into account.

The approach I’m showing is a proof of concept, a starting point on how such a feature can be implemented. The code is based on the open-source Neo4j Streaming Data Integrations plugin, which has been adapted for our use case.

The example application is, of course, based on a coffee shop example I shared earlier this year.

You find the post here.

My personal achievements in 2020

Especially in a year like 2020 it’s very healthy and helpful to remind ourselves on all the great things that happened and what we’ve accomplished.

I usually take a few days at the end of the year to reflect what I’ve achieved and where I want to go next, but I’ve never found it more helpful than in 2020. I try to ask myself, what went really well, what would I have done differently, what am I proud of, what do I want to do more …​ and less of.

In case it sparks some inspiration, here are my personal achievements in 2020:

DayCaptain — a personal task & time management tool

I also want to introduce a Corona-weekend side project of mine: DayCaptain, which is a personal time & task management tool that takes a few different approaches to what’s out there. You can think of it as a proper combination of todos and calendar entries, with an efficient usability, by, of course, a keyboard concept.

DayCaptain helps to focus during the day what’s next, and allows to review and plan your days to spend your time more efficient.

I’ve been using that tool every single day for a few years now, and am happy that together with a friend of mine, we can share it with others as well. From own experience, I’m convinced that it can help a lot in guiding how we want to, and actually do spend our days.

If you think this might be something for you, check out the website daycaptain.com to try it out yourself. Since a lot of us had a rather turbulent year, DayCaptain is free of charge in 2020 and in January 2021. This is an early version that I want to share, so in case you run into any issues, have some thoughts, comments, feedback, please reach out to me directly.

Now, I wish you all Happy Holidays, health and joy, and a great start into 2021!

Thanks a lot for reading and see you next time.