A Java geek

Replace Philips Hue automation with Home Assistant's

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.

Technical

The Home Assistant model

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.

Technical

Why Home Assistant?

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.

Technical

Pseudo-Random Number Generators: From the Origins to Modern Algorithms

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.

Development

Langchain4J musings

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.

Book

DuckDB in Action

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.

Technical

Digital Twins: A digital counterpart for a new concept of Product

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.

Development

Summary of the AJAX frameworks comparison

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.

Development

Vaadin, the battery-included server-side AJAX framework

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.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog