A Java Geek weekly 150

Distributing webapps via Homebrew. Reserved Top Level DNS Names. No, local models will not win. What’s the best programming language for coding agents? Claude Code pricing: same tokens, same model, up to 40x the price. Don’t yell at your colleagues; yell in your shell. Buildpacks Move the Container Hardening Control Point Away From the Dockerfile. Our coding agent commits deserve better than Co-Authored-By. Run AI agents safely in local sandboxes. Exploring Rego ebook.

• 2 min read
Distributing webapps via Homebrew

Distributing Java webapps via Docker is pretty widespread. However, regarding replacing desktop applications, it suffers from a not-so-great integration with the user’s desktop. On OSX, a quite popular distribution channel is Homebrew. Let’s dedicate this post to check how to distribute our desktop webapp via Homebrew.

Reserved Top Level DNS Names
  • .test
  • .example
  • .invalid
  • .localhost
  • example.com
  • example.net
  • example.org
No, local models will not win

It pains me, but the author’s arguments are sound. It also matches my personal experience. I have tried to use local models more than a couple of time. It’s slow, quite unreliable, and you can’t measure against models from vendors.

What’s the best programming language for coding agents?

My best was on statically-typed languages; the "wisdom of the crowd" seems to favor dynamically-typed languages. The quick research in the post is inconclusive to arbiter between the two.

However, one conclusion: widespread languages beat "niche" languages. It makes sense, as there’s more available material.

Claude Code pricing: same tokens, same model, up to 40x the price

Claude Code budgeting antipatterns:

+ * Restricting everyone to Haiku * The free-for-all * Heavy, centralized procurement

Don’t yell at your colleagues; yell in your shell

TIL (or Things I remember): !. I usually use CTRL + R.

Buildpacks Move the Container Hardening Control Point Away From the Dockerfile

I have tried both. I agree about the potential dangers of ad-hoc Dockerfile. However, I dislike the developer experience of buildpacks, and performance was abysmal the last time I tried.

Our coding agent commits deserve better than Co-Authored-By

Old man yells at cloud? I don’t know, but I think there are more important things to be grumpy about.

Run AI agents safely in local sandboxes

I should probably use them. So far, I ran assistants and local models directly on my laptop.

Exploring Rego ebook

I got interested in Open Policy Agent in the past. You configure policies using the Rego language. It’s far from trivial. It involved a lot of trials and errors, even though it was a short policy file for a demo.

It didn’t read the book above, but I hope it helps.

X For You Feed Algorithm

A benefit of open-source is that you can see that changes like this exist, and exactly how they work

Who believes that the GitHub project is the actual algorithm deployed in production?

Jimfs

Jimfs is an in-memory file system for Java 8 and above, implementing the java.nio.file abstract file system APIs.

I used it for the first time this week. Pretty slick; just use Path instead of File.