A Java geek

Last week, I described how to add a dynamic watermark to your images on the JVM. I didn’t find any library, so I had to develop the feature, or, more precisely, an embryo of a feature, by myself. Depending on your tech stack, you must search for an existing library or roll up your sleeves. For example, Rust offers such an out-of-the-box library. Worse, this approach might be impossible to implement if you don’t have access to the source image.

Displaying images on your website makes for an interesting problem: on one side, you want to make them publicly available; on the other, you want to protect them against undue use. The age-long method to achieve it is watermarking: A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio, video or image data. It is typically used to identify ownership of the copyright of such signal.

In my earlier post about moving from Kotlin Scripting to Python, I mentioned several reasons: Separating the content from the scriptKotlin Scripting is an unloved child of JetBrainsRenovate cannot update Kotlin Scripting files I was wrong on the third point. Here’s my mea culpa. First things first, Renovate does indeed manages Kotlin Scripting files - since 2022. Even better, Renovate can manage any type of file.

I moved my blog from WordPress to GitLab Pages in…​ 2016. I’m happy with the solution. However, I used GitHub Pages when I was teaching for both the courses and the exercises, e.g., Java EE. At the time, there was no GitHub Actions: I used Travis CI to build and deploy. Recently, I had to use GitHub Pages to publish my Apache APISIX workshop. Travis is no longer free. GitHub Actions are a thing. I used the now nominal path and faced a few hurdles; here are my findings.

My ideas for blog posts inevitably start to dry up after over two years at Apache APISIX. Hence, I did some triage on the APISIX repo. I stumbled upon this one question: We have a requirement to use a plugin, where we need to route the traffic on percentage basis. I’ll give an example for better understanding. We have an URL https://xyz.com/ca/fr/index.html where ca is country (canada) and fr is french language. Now the traffic needs to routed 10% to https://xyz.com/ca/en/index.

I continue to work on my Opentelemetry demo. Its main idea is to showcase traces across various technology stacks, including asynchronous communication via an MQTT queue. This week, I added a couple of components and changed the architecture. Here are some noteworthy learnings; note that some of them might not be entirely connected to OpenTelemetry. Here’s an updated diagram. New components appear in violet, and updated components appear in green.