O&B Insights
Expert Blogposts for Tech & Software Engineering
Welcome to O&B Insights, the official thought leadership and engineering resource hub of O&B. Dive into our latest O&B Tech Insights, featuring deep-dive blogposts for tech professionals, software architects, and IT leaders. From mastering Agile development and enterprise Java to navigating the disruptive shifts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, explore our archives to stay ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.
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“Sprint Zero” Activities Can’t Fit in One Sprint!
February 11, 2026 - Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum and Kanban emerged from the rescue of so called “Death March...
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Incentivizing Testers to Find Bugs is Counterproductive
February 11, 2026 - Devs & testers will always debate about whether a bug is really a bug, and...
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Beginning Database Optimization
February 11, 2026 - I always start my classes with this: It’s called optimization, not minimization or maximization. Why?...
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The 5 Common Types of Database Storage & When to Use Each
February 11, 2026 - While, there are a lot of decisions you can make in software development that you...
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AI Won’t Fix Your Data Problems. It’s About to Magnify Them.
February 11, 2026 - The directive has come down from on high: “We need an AI strategy, and we...
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O&B Automates Recruitment with AI
August 14, 2025 - Faster Hiring, Better Talent, Lower Cost In a global talent market where competition is fierce...
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BSP’s Tangonan on Revolutionizing Digital Payments
June 18, 2025 - The Philippine digital payments continue to shape the financial landscape with groundbreaking innovations and new...
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O&B Partners with Azul to Boost Java Performance and Reduce Cloud Maintenance Costs
June 18, 2025 - Manila, Philippines – June 18, 2025 — Orange and Bronze Software Labs (O&B), the Philippines’...
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Why Constructor Injection is Preferred for Dependency Injection in Spring Boot
May 13, 2025 - Spring Boot’s Dependency Injection is fundamental to building maintainable, testable, and loosely coupled applications. Among...
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Soft Skills, Hard Impact
April 23, 2025 - In today’s rapidly evolving project management landscape, technical skills form the necessary foundation; however, it...
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Code the Future: Closing the Gender Gap in Tech Leadership This IWD
April 8, 2025 - Despite women making up a significant portion of the Philippine workforce, a 2023 study by...
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Clean Code: Mastering Software Craftsmanship
January 21, 2025 - Writing clean code is not just a skill but an art that transforms mediocre software...
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Technical Debt: Why is my software development getting slower?
January 16, 2025 - Have you ever been the new developer on a team, brought in mid-project or mid-sprint,...
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Balancing Automated and Manual Test Scenarios
January 16, 2025 - Imagine a world where every single aspect of software testing is handled by machines. While...
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Risk-Based Testing: Budgeting Test Effort
January 16, 2025 - Around 100% of test coverage suggests that every line of code is being tested, which...
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Shift Left: Integrating Testing Early in Development
January 16, 2025 - In many organizations, software testing is often relegated to the end of the development cycle....
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Women Who Code: Championing Diversity in Tech
March 22, 2024 - Key Takeaways Introduction Over the years, gender inclusivity has constantly been a subject of dispute...
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Philippines Launches IT Skills Framework
February 1, 2024 - In today’s rapidly advancing technological world, the gap between academic learning and industry requirements in...
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Why Do We Need the Philippine Skills Framework?
January 26, 2024 - I have the honor of helping draft the Philippine Skills Framework on Software Development and...
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Steps to Good User Experience
January 18, 2024 - In our fifth week working on a coffee shop application as O&B’s Software Engineer Interns,...
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How Efficient Cloud Computing Cuts Energy Costs and Boosts Business Value
December 7, 2023 - Key Takeaways: In today’s era, where technology is an indisputable driver of change, organizations globally...
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AI Insights: Is Healthcare Jumping on the AI Train?
December 7, 2023 - Are organizations unlocking the potential of generative AI to transform healthcare or is it simply...
Interview
Breaking Barriers and Empowering Women in Tech: Inspiring Stories and Advice
December 4, 2023 - In the rapidly evolving landscape of the tech industry, women have not only navigated challenges...
Article
Integrated Testing with Spring Mock MVC, Test Containers, and Gradle
April 12, 2022 - Calen presented a webinar on Integration Testing as part of PSIA’s advocacy for the upskilling...
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An Introduction to the Raspberry Pi
September 7, 2021 - Outline What is a Raspberry Pi? The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost, credit card-sized (or...
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Face to Face (Client Interaction)
August 24, 2021 - I’m Justin and I work as a Quality Engineer for O&B. I have been given...
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DbUnit FlatXmlDataSet – How to Ignore DTD
August 19, 2021 - A quick tutorial on DbUnit FlatXmlDataSet. I started out trying to use DbUnit FlatXmlDataSet without...
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Agile Myth #7: Agile Means No Documentation
August 12, 2021 - This is Calen’s eight post in a 13-part series, “Agile Myths and Misconceptions” where he strives to...
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Agile Myth #6: Agile Means No Upfront Design
July 15, 2021 - This is Calen’s seventh post in a 13-part series, “Agile Myths and Misconceptions” where he strives to...
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Agile Myth #5: Agile is Unpredictable
July 8, 2021 - This is Calen’s sixth post in a 13-part series, “Agile Myths and Misconceptions” where he strives to...
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Agile Myth #4: Agile Cannot Work with Fixed Budgets
July 1, 2021 - This is my fifth post in my 13-part series, “Agile Myths and Misconceptions”, It’s based...
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Changing The Way We Use JPA
June 24, 2021 - I’ve been updating some training materials recently, and thinking about better ways of teaching and...
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Agile Myth #3: Agile is Short Milestones
June 17, 2021 - This is Calen’s fourth post in a 13-part series, “Agile Myths and Misconceptions” where he strives to...
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Agile Myth #2: Agile is Just About Project Management
June 10, 2021 - This is part of a series where Calen will discuss twelve common myths about Agile...
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Agile Myth #1: Agile is a Methodology
June 3, 2021 - Calen discusses why he thinks Agile itself is not a process. Rather, Agile is the...
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Agile Myths & Misconceptions
May 27, 2021 - I spoke at SofTech, the Philippine Software Industry Association’s first Software Engineering conference. We had...
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Foreign Keys – What Do You Think?
May 5, 2021 - Join the discussion about the pros and cons of using Foreign Keys One of my...
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Template Method Pattern Example Using Java Generics
April 29, 2021 - A tutorial on how to use the Template Method to eliminate error-prone code duplication. If...
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Feedback: Giving, Seeking, and Receiving
April 22, 2021 - In managing software projects, feedback is critical. Here are some helpful notes on giving feedback...
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Top Three Missing Pieces with Startup Pitches I’ve Seen
April 15, 2021 - Calen shares pitching advice for technopreneurs and hackathon participants. This article explains the top three...
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The Perks of a Jupyter Notebook
March 25, 2021 - Some of us scream Eureka! and others immediately pass out, but when the code finally works and...
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AWS Certification Story Part2
March 18, 2021 - Hello everyone! In my previous blog post, I basically wrote a small primer on Cloud Computing....
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Creating Great First Impressions in the Time of COVID
March 11, 2021 - Before the COVID19 era, walking into an interviewer’s office demanded a lot from you. Back...
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AWS Certification Story Part1
March 4, 2021 - The following post is based on the talk I did for one of our weekly S.K.I.L.L...
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Basic Image Editing with GIMP – (Part 2)
February 25, 2021 - In part 1, we learned about what GIMP is, its commonly used windows, and how to...
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Basic Image Editing with GIMP – (Part 1)
February 18, 2021 - Have you ever wondered how to use GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) for your image...
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Dependency Injection With Java SPI
February 9, 2021 - In the modern scene of Java, applications can be written quickly thanks to many third-party...
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TypeScript: An Introduction
February 2, 2021 - What is TypeScript? In a nutshell, it is simply JavaScript… but with types! According to typescriptlang.org, it...
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Reduce Repetitive Code in Spring MVC Controllers
September 17, 2020 - After spending some time doing sustained engineering (a.k.a. maintaining legacy code), I ventured to reduce...
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JasperReports: The Tricky Parts
February 27, 2018 - If you have been programming in Java long enough, chances are you needed to generate...
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DataSource Routing with Spring @Transactional
February 13, 2018 - I was inspired by Carl Papa’s use of aspects with the Spring Framework to determine...
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How not to use Java 8 Streams
January 24, 2018 - Now (it’s been years) that Java has gotten functional programming syntax, it can be pretty...
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Eclipselink 2.5.2 (JPA 2.1.0): Determining Fetch State
December 21, 2017 - This discussion made use of JPA 2.1.0 and Eclipselink 2.5.2. Specs and implementation and may change in future releases....
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Bills Payment Collection: Teller’s Perspective
December 6, 2017 - Typical Scenario in the World of Bills Payment Mr. Postman approaches a residential gate and...
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Isolating the Domain Logic
January 4, 2017 - Lorenzo explains the reason why code in applications is arranged and split in a certain...
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Architectural Layers and Modeling Domain Logic
November 14, 2016 - Lorenzo corrects the impression that the domain model pattern is always the best to use....
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JPA Pitfalls / Mistakes
September 13, 2016 - Learn the common pitfalls/mistakes encountered that caused some problems in Java-based systems that use JPA....
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Spring-managed Transactions Explained – Part 1 (JDBC)
September 13, 2016 - Learn how transactions work in plain-vanilla JDBC and how Spring manages JDBC-based transactions. I’ve been...
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Blob Handling in Java and JDBC
October 5, 2015 - Lorenzo simplifies BLOB handling. Read on to find out how. Whenever I search the web...
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Effective Design Patterns and Poetry
July 19, 2015 - Lorenzo tries to make design patterns principles easy to remember through poetry. In one of...
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Top 3 Improvements New Agile Teams Can Make
December 17, 2014 - If you’re new to Agile, here are three things to keep in mind to build...
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Purpose of SOA
October 2, 2014 - An overview of Service-Oriented Architecture, including benefits, concepts, and limitations. After having a few more...
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Using Git & GitHub to Manage a Class
October 2, 2014 - Calen tells us about the advantages of using Git and GitHub for his classes at...
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Domain-Driven Design: Cargo Shipping Example (Part 2)
September 30, 2014 - Lorenzo continues the discussion on DDD, this time with a focus on persistence of value...
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Domain-Driven Design: Cargo Shipping Example
September 14, 2014 - Lorenzo discusses DDD using a cargo shipping scenario. I’ve always found the cargo shipping example used in Eric...
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Mapping a Map in JPA
July 14, 2014 - It’s common to see a java.util.List being used for a to-many mapping (with ORM). And it’s also common to...
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Show, Don’t Just Tell
July 7, 2014 - Lorenzo tells us that when it comes to software design, it’s not always about asking....
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Quantifying Domain Model versus Transaction Script
July 1, 2014 - I’ve been conducting training classes (with Orange and Bronze) that cover topics like TDD, design patterns...
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Gaining Domain Knowledge of ISO-8583 Messages
February 22, 2014 - Let’s talk about how we improved code readability and gained domain knowledge in creating ISO 8583 messages...
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TDD is a Great Way to Pick-Up Where You Left Off
February 10, 2014 - I just realized that TDD is a great way to pick up where you left...
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Early UI, Early Feedback, Better Results
November 1, 2013 - A few months back, I was reviewing some internal apps we had in our organization,...
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Arrays.asList() – Why You Should Wrap It
August 13, 2013 - Ria shows us why you should wrap a list inside a list implementation if you’re...
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Caching in Java with LRUMap
June 17, 2013 - Ria briefs us about the LRUMap and how it is used to cache recently used...
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Grails, also works as a time compressor
May 15, 2013 - Karl gives us a brief on how Grails works, why it is the convenient app...
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Maven & Archiva – No Dependency Information Available / Missing POM
April 29, 2013 - Ria tells programmers what she discovered and how she solved the case of the missing...
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Groovy and Grails Infographic
March 13, 2013 - What? A Groovy and Grails infographic? Yes, finally! We’ve been trying to look all over...
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Agile Outsourcing is Like Dating & Marriage – A 5-Step Agile Outsourcing How-To
December 20, 2012 - There’s a lot of horror stories in offshore outsourcing of software development, but every once...
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Beginning Android Part 4 – Apache Cordova Persistence Support
August 15, 2012 - Catch Up! If you haven’t seen the first three parts of this Beginning Android tutorial series,...
Article
Heroes of Technology: The Search Guru
July 19, 2012 - We’ve all heard how wonderful it is to work for Google. Aside from working on...
Interview
Tommy Lim Jr. on ANC’s Future Perfect
May 23, 2012 - O&B’s Tommy Lim Jr. guests on Future Perfect to talk about Artificial Intelligence – which...