A Java geek

Clean your Memory: From Finalize to Cleaner

Garbage collection in Java takes care of memory management, but it does not clean up non-memory resources like sockets or file handles. Resource leaks may occur without proper management, leading to performance degradation or crashes. Java’s Cleaner API, introduced in Java 9, provides a modern and efficient mechanism for resource cleanup when objects are no longer reachable.

Technical

One giant Kubernetes cluster for everything

The ideal size of your Kubernetes clusters is a day 0 question and demands a definite answer. You find one giant cluster on one end of the spectrum and many small-sized ones on the other, with every combination in between. This decision will impact your organization for years to come. Worse, if you decide to change your topology, you’re in for a time-wasting and expensive ride. I want to list each approach’s pros and cons in this post.

Technical

Improving Maven's dependency:analyze... or not

Recently, my good friend Richard Fichtner advised using the mvn dependency:analyze command to get rid of declared but unused dependencies: There is another use case for mvn dependency:analyze It can show you the dependencies you use in your code but have not declared in your pom.xml. This works because you have a transitive dependency on your classpath. Either don't use the dependency or declare it.[image or embed]— Richard Fichtner 💻☕ (@richard.fichtner.

Technical

WebAssembly on Kubernetes

Like a couple of innovative technologies, different people have different viewpoints on where WebAssembly fits the technology landscape. WebAssembly (also called Wasm) is certainly the subject of much hype right now. But what is it? Is it the JavaScript Killer? Is it a new programming language for the web? Is it (as we like to say) the next wave of cloud compute?

Technical

Pull request testing on Kubernetes: vCluster for isolation and costs control

This week’s post is the third and final in my series about running tests on Kubernetes for each pull request. In the first post, I described the app and how to test locally using Testcontainers and in a GitHub workflow. The second post focused on setting up the target environment and running end-to-end tests on Kubernetes. I concluded the latter by mentioning a significant quandary. Creating a dedicated cluster for each workflow significantly impacts the time it takes to run.

Technical

Pull Request testing on Kubernetes: working with GitHub Actions and GKE

I’m continuing my series on running the test suite for each Pull Request on Kubernetes. In the previous post, I laid the groundwork for our learning journey: I developed a basic JVM-based CRUD app, tested it locally using Testcontainers, and tested it in a GitHub workflow with a GitHub service container. This week, I will raise the ante to run the end-to-end test in the target Kubernetes environment.

Technical

Pull request testing on Kubernetes: testing locally and on GitHub workflows

Imagine an organization with the following practices: Commits code on GitHubRuns its CI/CD pipelines with GitHub ActionsRuns its production workload on KubernetesUses Google Cloud A new engineer manager arrives and asks for the following: On every PR, run integration tests in a Kubernetes cluster similar to the production one. It sounds reasonable.

Development

Remote Development made simple with DevPod

I come relatively late to the subject of Remote Development Environments (also known as Cloud Development Environments). The main reason is that I haven’t worked in a development team for over six years. However, I’m now working for Loft Labs, and we have a RDE product: DevPod. I wanted to understand our value proposition as I’ll be at FOSDEM operating the DevPod booth.

Development

On inheritance and subtyping

Java is the first language I learned in my career. Its structure is foundational in my early years of understanding programming concepts. After going through several other languages with very different approaches, I’ve widened my point of view. Today, I want to reflect on the idea of inheritance. Inheritance in Java In Java, the idea of inheritance is tightly coupled with the concept of subtyping. Subtyping is the implementation of a IS A relationship.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog