A Java geek

Some, if not most, of our judgments regarding technology stacks come either from third-party opinions or previous experiences. Yet, we seem to be adamant about them. For a long time (and sometimes even now), I’ve seen posts that detailed how Spring is bad because it uses XML for its configuration. Unfortunately, they blissfully ignore the fact that annotation-based configuration has been available for ages. Probably because of the same reason I recently read that Spring is bad…​

There’s still an ongoing debate whether development in particular and IT, in general, are engineering practices. In all cases, there’s no denying that our industry is based on scientific foundations. Most of the organizations I’ve worked for implement the Deming wheel in one form or another: From a bird’s eye view, it makes a lot of sense. And given the success of the method in the Japanese car industry, there’s no denying that it’s effective. However,

On March 14th, 2020, I landed home. I had planned the week before to be productive: one talk in Pasadena, two talks in San Francisco, one in Bucharest, and one in Istanbul. Then, on the 16th, I was supposed to fly again to other events. Then, Covid happened. Governments started to close borders; in turn, organizers began to cancel events. I managed to do the talk in Pasadena with about ten people in the room. The organizer of one of the San Francisco talks managed to move my talk online. The re

Since Docker announced that it would remove unused images from Docker Hub, I’ve been interested in listing places where I could host mine. As it’s for personal purposes, I’m interested in free plans. Here’s what I found.

For once, I’m wondering a bit if this post can be helpful to somebody else. I believe my context is pretty specific. Anyway, just in case it might be the case, here it is. My Jet Train project makes use of GTFS. GTFS stands for General Transit Feed Specification. It models public transportation schedules and their associated geographic information. GTFS is based on two kinds of data, static data, and dynamic data. Static data may change but do so rarely, e.g., transit agencies and bus s

This is the 9th post in the Start Rust focus series. I’ll be honest: I initially wanted to describe all collections available in Rust as well as their related concepts. Then, I started to dig a bit into it, and I decided it would have been (much) too long. For that reason, I’ll restrict the scope to the Vec type.

This week, I want to take a break from my Start Rust series and focus on a different subject. I’ve already written about my blogging stack in detail. However, I didn’t touch into one facet, and that facet is how I generate the static pages from Jekyll. As I describe in the blog post, I’ve included quite a couple of customizations. Some of them require external dependencies, such as: A JRE for PlantUML diagrams generationThe graphviz package for the same reasonetc. All in all

This is the 8th post in the Start Rust focus series. For me, the best learning process is switching regularly between learning and doing, theory and practice. The last post was research, hence, this one will be coding. I’ve been a player of Role-Playing Games since I’m 11. Of course, I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons (mainly the so-called Advanced Edition) but after a few years, I’ve taken upon Champions and its HERO system. The system is based on points allotment and all

This is the 7th post in the Start Rust focus series. So far, we have learned the basics of Rust syntax, developed a custom Kubernetes controller, and integrated with the front-end with Wasm. I’ve been using the JVM for two decades now, mainly in Java. The JVM is an amazing piece of technology. IMHO, its biggest benefit is its ability to adapt the native code to the current workload; if the workload changes and the native code is not optimal, it will recompile the bytecode accordingly again.

This is the 6th post in the Start Rust focus series. To teach myself Kubernetes in general and controllers in particular, I previously developed one in Java. This week, I decide to do the same in Rust by following the same steps I did. The guiding principle is the creation of a Kubernetes controller that watches pods' lifecycle and 'binds' a sidecar to them. When the main pod is scheduled, the controller schedules the sidecar; when it’s deleted, it deletes it as well.