Nicolas Fränkel

It’s funny how things come in sequences. Recently, on three separate occasions, I stumbled upon questions asking what people used for front-end technologies. Every time, my answer was Vaadin. Unfortunately, some places, e.g. Twitter, are too limiting to explain my answer in depth. In this blog, I’ve no such limitations. In one sentence, Vaadin is a framework to create GUI using plain Java, or any JVM-based language for that matter. One develop in Java, and the framework takes care o

Because of the recent worldly travel restrictions, I recently found myself writing more code than usual. After having reviewed it, I noticed I was not very satisfied with it. I believe that comes from the fact that Java is an 'old' language, but it has evolved a lot, especially in its latest versions. While working with a language for a long time, one is bound to get habits, whether good or bad. When the language changes, it takes a conscious effort to change those habits. Yet, this is necessary,

In the first post of this series, we detailed the setup of a software to automate submissions to conferences. In the second one, we configured the integration endpoints. This third post is dedicated to the deployment of the solution to production. To Cloud or not to Cloud? To decide what to do, the first step is to ask oneself whether to host: On-premiseIn the CloudOr even use my own machine First, let’s remove on-premise from the options. It wouldn’t make sense, as I’m th

In the previous post, I described a poster child for automation: managing the repetitive tasks around a conference submission workflow. I wrote about the setup, and how to use ngrok to redirect webhooks to my computer. This week, I’d like to write about some of the hiccups I encountered along the way. Registering a Trello webhook Most SaaS providers allow to register webhooks through their GUI. This is the case of GitHub for example: it’s located in the Settings  Webhooks men

Even given the current situation, part of my Developer Advocate job is to talk at (virtual) conferences. Sometimes, organizers invite me. Yet, most of the times, I need to take part in a CfP. With the sheer numbers of conferences I submit to, I need a tool to manage the status of each submission. Since I started, Trello has been my tool of choice. I’ve a dedicated board with several defined columns: backlog, abandoned, submitted, rejected, submitted and done. A conference is a card that I m

Before the quarantine, one of my former students asked me an interesting question: does GitHub sens an email to the owner of a repository, if an issue is opened on this repo? The answer is not important. As a former consultant, I tried to understand the root question. After digging a bit, I understood it: the student was using a project he found on GitHub. That project was lacking a feature, and the issue was to request it. After a casual glance, I realized I personally never would have used such

In Java, annotations and annotation processors are surrounded by a shroud of mystery for most. They seem like a subject reserved for 'experts''. On top of that, I believe there’s also some FUD around them. This post aims to dig into the subject, in the most neutral way possible. This way, everybody can take enlightened decisions based on facts, not by listening to people full of misconceptions or hidden agendas. Annotations are available since Java version 5, codenamed Tiger, and released

I started teaching in higher education organizations when I was still a student. That was more than 20 years ago. I’ve never stopped since then. I’ve taught in different kind of organizations (i.e. engineering schools, universities, and applied science schools) and two different countries, France and Switzerland. A common trait among all those jobs was the requirement to teach on-site. In fact, my current employer goes to the point of specifying it explicitly in its regulations.