A Java geek

Loosely coupled configuration for Home Assistant

This is the 8th post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. This post will be short, but I hope useful. My home is getting more and more connected, and the number of my automations grow each month. Recently, I equipped my roller shutters with connected Somfy engines so they could roll down automatically when it’s too hot in summer. Spoiler: given the current heatwave, it’s a boon!

Java

Do You know how to batch?

Concurrent systems face a delicate balance: enabling high throughput under contention while maintaining low latency and predictable behavior. Traditional locking strategies and naive parallelization often introduce performance bottlenecks through cache contention, false sharing, and excessive context switching.

Technical

Broadcast devices' name on the local network

With years, I accumulated devices on my local network, which in general run on Linux. I meticulously added them to my /etc/hosts/ file, so as not to remember their IP. Something puzzled me, though: my Synology NAS was readily available as nas.local on the network, without doing anything. I have close to zero skills in system administration, so here are my findings. The .local domain We can learn more about .local domain from Wikipedia. The domain name .

Development

Testing an OpenRewrite recipe

For the last two weeks, I’ve kicked the tires of OpenRewrite. At first, I created a recipe to move Kotlin source files as per the official recommendations with a set package name. I then improved the recipe to compute the root automatically. In both versions, I thoroughly tested the recipe. However, my testing approach was wrong. In this post, I want to describe my mistakes, and how I fixed them.

Development

Improving my previous OpenRewrite recipe

I started discovering OpenRewrite last week by writing a Kotlin recipe that moves Kotlin files according to the official directory structure recommendation. I mentioned some future works, and here they are. In this post, I want to describe how to compute the root package instead of letting the user set it.

Development

Authoring an OpenRewrite recipe

I’ve been eying OpenRewrite for some time, but I haven’t had time to play with it yet. In case you never heard about OpenRewrite, OpenRewrite takes care of refactoring your codebase to newer language, framework, and paradigm versions. OpenRewrite is an open-source automated refactoring ecosystem for source code, enabling developers to effectively eliminate technical debt within their repositories.

Development

Runtime-initialized variables in Rust

Rust offers different ways to initialize compile time-initialized variables. Recently, I had to create a runtime-initialized variable: existing approaches don’t work in this case. I want to describe multiple ways to achieve it in this post. Constants The Rust language allows you to create constants. Two keywords are available: const and static. Sometimes a certain value is used many times throughout a program, and it can become inconvenient to copy it over and over.

Book

Writing for Developers

I started this blog as a hobby seventeen years ago, in April 2008. At the time, I had no clue about technical writing. I’m pretty sure it was not even a thing back then: the only content aimed at developers was technical documentation. Since then, the landscape has changed a lot, to the point that companies hire for technical writer positions. I was curious to compare what I learned by doing to the structured approach of a book.

Technical

Getting a single value from a device's state in Home Assistant

This is the 7th post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I recently acquired Netatmo smart radiator valves to manage my rooms' temperature remotely. I’m not skilled at manual tasks, but I could easily replace the old thermo-static valves. I then registered the smart ones in the Netatmo app. Finally, I integrated them in my Home Assistant via the dedicated Netatmo integration. Everything was very straightforward.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog