Blog

I love Java 21! And I love virtual threads, in particular!

Hi, my friends. I sometimes see folks debating JMS versus RabbitMQ.

My friend Dashaun (@dashaun) turned me onto this very handy utility. It's amazing. Want to have arbitrary environment variables at your finger tips when working on projects? Tired of having to lovingly craft environment variables to pour into your IDE's run configuration? Check out direnv

A couple of years ago, my beloved Shiftit application stopped doing the right thing. Shiftit, if you don't know, is a window manager that gives me keybindings to move windwos around on macOS. It's a treasure, and gives me the kind of window management I'd become accustomed to in Linux and even -gasp (!) - Windows.

After moving to a more spacious condo in San Francisco at the height of the pandemic in 2020, my trusty Apple Airport Extreme wireless router struggled to keep up with the new dimensions. My daughter's room was on the opposite end of condo as the ethernet drop was. Enter Amazon's Eero mesh routers. I was initially hesitant about Amazon's recent acquisition of Eero, but dove in feet-first anyway. I set up the main gateway by the ethernet and added two beacons—one in the hallway and another in the living room—to boost the signal. It was decent - but not perfect - and the limited ports for wired connectivity was a constraint.

In a previous post, I alluded to my need for more wired connectivity on my home Wi-Fi router. Here's why: I wanted to plugin a Starlink hub to adapt my Google Nest thermostats to work with Apple Home automation. Many years ago, I wanted things to work well together, so I decided to go all-in on the Apple ecosystem.

In 2022, I bought a Sony A7S iii for use in producing my YouTube videos ( see Spring Tips (@SpringTipsLive) and Coffee Software (@coffeesoftwareshow)). I did the normal things. I installed the Sony Imaging Edge software, which let me launch, configure settings on the camera, and start and stop recordings, all from within my macOS environment. It was OK, but it was only, in effect, a proxy for the mechanisms for controlling the camera on the camera's menu systems. I also installed the Sony Imaging Webcam application. It does something slightly different: it lets me use the Sony A7S iii as a webcam for Zoom, Google Meet, etc. Awkwardly, it doesn't let me use the camera as a camera from any arbitrary operating system application, like Quicktime, which I use routinely to record my face as I'm doing a demo on the machine. It seemed redundant; I think the Sony Imaging Edge application already lets you do this. I'm not 100% sure.

hey, while Gradle doesn't officially support Java 21, you can still build and work with Spring Boot on Java 21.

It's 2023 and you know nothing about Java. How do you get started? Try this.

There has never been a better time to be a Java developer. Java 21 - and I can not stress this enough - is coming out on September 19th, 2023! It'll be followed shortly thereafter by a GraalVM release which will permite native image compilation. I can't wait to get my code to GraalVM native images on Java 21, so I wanted to chronicle the steps involved in setting things up today, before the final releases. I want to acknowledge the extra dedicated and valuable help of Alina Yurenko, GraalVM developer advocate extraordinairre, in pulling all this information together. THANK YOU.

Ever wanted to publish an artifact to your instance of the excellent Artifactory artifact repository.. except directly, using curl? You have? What's wrong with you? I know why I need to do it and I'm not proud!

I know this should probably be common knowledge, but I always want to find a way to do this, and always find it, and then forget it, and the cycle continues.