A Java geek

In the last couple of years, I’ve been playing a bit with a generation of tools in the Java world, namely Micronaut, Quarkus and GraalVM. While I’m a Spring Boot fan since its beginning, I believe this quite an eye-opening opportunity. In this post, I’d like to see how easy, or how hard, it is to port a simple Spring Boot application to Micronaut. Setting up the context The JVM is an great piece of technology.

Last September, I wrote how to migrate from an Imperative Programming codebase to a Reactive Programming one in a step-by-step process. Because of its popularity, I illustrated the post with a Spring Boot demo. The final result uses Mono and Flux from Project Reactor. I also made sure that no step in the processing pipeline is blocking thanks to Blockhound. I wrote the code in Java so that it could be accessible to the largest audience. But I’m still a Kotlin fan at heart.

At the beginning of 2019, I wrote about the state of Java modularization. I took a sample of widespread libraries, and for each of them, I checked whether: It supports the module system i.e. it provides an automatic module name in the manifestIt’s a full-fledged module i.e. it provides a module-info The results were interesting. 14 out of those 29 libraries supported the module system, while 2 were modules in their own right.

My job requires me to speak at conferences. Despite the current situation, this hasn’t changed much. At the time of this writing, I submitted 439 different proposals to 215 unique conferences in 2020. I already wrote some advice for junior conference speakers. As a follow-up, I’d like to offer my view on the organization of conferences, from my speaker’s point-of-view. While the online and the on-site experiences are quite different, most of my feedback applies to both.

Containerizing an application based on a 'scripting' language is straightforward. Add the sources, download the dependencies, and you’re good to go. One could say they are WYSIWYR. With compiled languages in general, and Java in particular, things are a bit different. In this post, I’d like to list some alternatives to achieve that.

When I started my career, books with titles such as 'Teach Yourself C in 21 Days', and 'Learn Java in 7 Days' were pretty popular. I was impressed that people could read such books. I never thought I could learn a new language in such a small amount of time myself. Time has passed. I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in that case. Those books just happen to stretch the definition of learning a new programming language - and I’m being polite.