In today's distributed systems, errors are inevitable. The circuit breaker is a well-established pattern to make our applications more robust in case of errors. 

If a remote system returns a number of errors, we open the circuit to stop future calls to reach out to the remote system and instead return a fallback value. After a while, we check if the remote system is healthy again and close the circuit to resume normal function. 

In the new article, Saajan explains how to implement circuit breakers with Resilience4J, the de-facto standard JVM framework for resilience patterns.

How much time do you spend every day waiting for tests to run, a CI build to finish, or your IDE to finish indexing? (yes, I'm talking about you, IntelliJ!)

What are you doing in that time? More often than not, I'm grabbing my phone and start doom scrolling through my Twitter feed. This has almost zero value for me. 

So, I've made a list of things to do during short waiting periods that bring value and don't require much context switching (so I can quickly move back into the original task once IntelliJ has finally finished indexing...).

Here's my list of things to do to choose from while waiting for a build:

• clean up the desk 
• clean up the room
• drink a glass of water
• stretch a bit
• change your position (from sitting to standing, from the desk to the couch, ...)
• reflect the day so far and think about things that stand out (these might be share-worthy on social networks)
• learn to solve a Rubik's Cube (I'm almost there)
• think through your current problem and write down upcoming tasks
• take notes for journaling
• think of things to write about 
• make a plan on what to cook in the next days
• make a plan on what to do with the family in the next days
• think of new things to do while waiting

Next time you're waiting, think about what you can do during that waiting period that makes you feel better!