A Java geek

This is the 3rd post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I’m the happy owner of a couple of Philips Hue connected lights for a some years. Some of them are colored, some of them regular. In addition, I bought a sensor to go along with the light I installed in my toilets: it turns on automatically when its detects a movement there. In this post, I want to document how I replaced the proprietary automation with Home Assistant’s.

Home Assistant is a massive beast. It can be overwhelming for a newcomer; it was for me. In this post, I want to describe the underlying model of Home Assistant, which is a good entry point for your home automation journey. The biggest issue in describing the Home Assistant is the number of conflicting sources for this model: The helpers package of the GitHub repositoryThe database; disclaimer: I didn’t find the schema generation in the code, and I wasn’t bold enough to check the d

This is the 1st post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. Last June, I spoke at Berlin Buzzwords. In all honesty, I rarely attend others' talks for a variety of reasons: lack of time, lack of energy, no interest in the proposed subjects, etc. When I do, I go either for subjects I know and want to deepen my understanding of or for subjects I know nothing about to get a foot in the door. This time, I attended Monitoring your home, with DevOps observability tools. I thought it would b

How can we generate a uniform sequence of random numbers? The randomness so beautifully and abundantly generated by nature has not always been easy for humans to extract and quantify. Pseudo-Random Number Generators are fundamental tools in many areas of software development: PRNGs do not produce truly random numbers but rather deterministic sequences that simulate randomness. The quality of a PRNG is determined by its ability to produce sequences that are statistically indistinguishable from t

I’m coming relatively late to the LLM party, but I rarely come very early in the hype cycle. For example, I never bought into blockchain, the solution still searching for problems to solve, nor in microservices, the latest in the cargo cult IT trends. Despite my late arrival at the LLM party, I have been a regular user of LLMs. I use OpenAI for non-controversial questions outside my cone of knowledge, e.g., linguistics or legal; I use GitHub Copilot in my IDE to improve my code. Th

The book was sent to me by Michael Simons. He asked for my feedback: I changed my reading schedule, took a few months, and here it is. Facts 10 chapters288 pages$33.59 (eBook) Note that MotherDuck, a company providing an online service that builds upon DuckDB, offers a free PDF copy. Chapters An introduction to DuckDBGetting started with DuckDBExecuting SQL queriesAdvanced aggregation and analysis of dataExploring data without persistenceIntegrating with the Python ecosystemDuckDB in the

Digital Twins, are digital replicas of physical assets, processes, or systems used to simulate, monitor, and optimize their real-world counterparts. Through real-time data exchange and advanced analytics, digital twins provide a virtual environment for testing scenarios, predicting outcomes, and enhancing decision-making. This concept, first introduced by Michael Grieves in 2002, has rapidly evolved and now plays a crucial role in various sectors, including manufacturing, healthcare, smart cities

In previous weeks, I’ve analyzed several libraries and frameworks that augment the client with AJAX capabilities. Vue.jsAlpine.jsHTMXVaadin In this post, I’ll compare them across several axes. Analysis Frontend skills Remember that I started this series from the point of view of a backend developer. In this section, I grade how much you need to know about client technologies to complete the job. Team organization In the introduction, I hinted that the decoupling of frontend

I’ve written a lot about Vaadin. I was so enthusiastic that I wrote the first book about it (besides the Book of Vaadin), its updated edition for Vaadin 7, and a companion website. Still, I’m amazed that so many people in the JVM world never heard of it. In this post, I’d like to introduce Vaadin in the context of AJAX and SSR. Short introduction to Vaadin The beauty of Vaadin lies in its simplicity - you only write backend code. You read that well. A Vaadin developer only

This post is part of a series comparing different ways to implement asynchronous requests on the client to augment the latter. So far, I described the process with Vue.js and Alpine.js. Both are similar from the developers' point of view: they involve JavaScript. In this post, I’ll focus on HTMX, whose approach is quite different. Laying out the work I’ll follow the same structure as in the previous posts of the series. Here’s the setup, server- and client-side. Server-s