Why I Think Git Flow Doesn't Fit Most Projects Anymore blog.sunix.org/articles/how...

Includes "Minecraft as an Observability Client" #JustSaying

One last piece of seasonal tech content: hollycummins.com/vampires-and... Why vampires and zombies are skulking in your codebase.

Sometimes, death is a feature, not a defect. hollycummins.com/death-and-so...

I don't know how to explain this coincidence if my computer doesn't have (a) self-awareness and (b) a malevolent sense of humour.

Change of plans - Quarkus is one hour *earlier* for the EU folks. :)

This reminds me about a walking route from Germany to NYC, USA I tried for fun some years ago. But back then Google listed „swim xxxx kilometers through the Atlantic ocean“ which surprised me in a positive way (that it recognized swimming).

Great talk by @hollycummins.com at Lindholmen developer day. As a data person and as someone who used to work with healthcare this resonated a lot: "don't make human tell computer things the computer already knows". It is so key but so often neglected in practice (&definitely a thief of joy) #databs

This looks more like a swimming route than a walking route, Google.

... and apparently our streaming provider uses AWS. :) So no Quarkus Insights today. Sorry, everyone!

Big hugs to everyone whose status page origin server is hosted on AWS and just pushes updates to a CDN cache.

As it's Friday, and coming up to halloween, please enjoy my favourite-ever slide deck: hollycummins.com/blood-curdli... The PDF doesn't capture how I animated the bat wings to flap on the containers, or how I used a greenscreen and and bat cutouts to make it look like bats were hovering over me.

I don't often donate to Wikipedia, but @molly.wiki's coverage of the current attacks on it has prompted me to pause-and-plunk-up.

It's 2025, and sharing a large file in a work context is still a significant headache. Shouldn't we have ... done better than this?

Darn. I should have worn my "assume all women are technical and can breathe fire" t-shirt.

I didn't have a chance to show this (generated in 13ms with a quarkus + picocli) in my #Devoxx talk:

Fascinating pointer from @kevlin.bsky.social and James Lewis: cepr.org/voxeu/column... "[Professions using AI] worked roughly 3.15 hours more per week in the post-ChatGPT period. When AI complements human labour rather than replacing it, the process makes each hour of work more valuable." #GOTOConf

I just tried to reproduce @janelleshane.com's brilliant "make an LLM apologise for suggesting a giraffe as CEO" experiment. It 100% worked on Ollama. Which is bad, because when I read it I did an involuntary shriek of laughter, and woke a sleeping puppy, and now I won't be able to do more work.

InfoQ have published "The Efficiency Paradox," complete with transcript. Apparently I said things like: - "Am I optimizing for the right thing, or should I maybe be just a little bit more jellyfish?" - "If you do the same experiment to your stool, it's much less cruel" www.infoq.com/presentation...

Expected: is "Hello from Quarkus REST" Actual: , Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., [many more Skibidis]., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi.. This demo is dog water. 😳

There's no sense crying over spilled milk, but spilled coffee? That's *definitely* worth crying over.

When Walkers analysed the carbon footprint of their crisp production, they discovered a big cost in drying out potatoes. Why were the potatoes wet? They paid farmers by wet weight, which created an incentive for farmers to increase humidity. Solution? Pay by dry weight. 🧵

The even more unbelievable crime fact (which I learned relatively recently) is that burglary has fallen by more than 90% since the 1990s. Did anyone notice? Nope. Does anyone believe it? Nope. But is is true? It is!

It's absolutely astonishing: In just about 13 years, Norway has skyrocketed from virtually no sales of zero-emission battery electric vehicles to nearly 100% of all new passenger car purchases.

*Lots* of goodness ⬇️ www.infoq.com/podcasts/neu... "Context switching is going to impair your decision-making. So maybe don't make any big business-critical decisions if you have nine hours of meetings back-to-back because you're going to probably do a suboptimal choice making in that context"

It's a common myth that dogs are meat-eaters. Based on observation of my puppy, their favourite food is rose bushes.

I want as many developers as possible to experience the joy of refactoring their code when they have a good test suite by their side. It's infectious. You'd want that feeling all the time.

Zombie applications are a big problem, but zombie libraries are bad too. Not sorting out CI and update automation leaves apps vulnerable to security vulnerabilities, but it also leaves them vulnerable to bad, expensive, planet-hurting,performance: thenewstack.io/outdated-pyt...

Past me submitted an abstract for Devoxx promising six labour-intensive demos, including this, totally sensible, demo: “Benchmark an application against a grapefruit, because metric units aren’t tasty”. Abstract got accepted. Current me is NOT IMPRESSED with past me.

🎙️ On today’s #GOTOpodcast, @trishagee.bsky.social & @charleshumble.bsky.social unpack Professional Skills for Software Engineers: • Why “soft skills” aren’t soft • Communication that drives products • Networking that opens doors 🎧 gotopia.tech/podcast

I’ve always wondered why electric cars don’t have solar panels on the roof, for charging on the move. Mercedes have gone one better, and invented solar-panel-paint. (For a broad definition of “paint”, but still, how cool is that??) www.automotiveworld.com/articles/mer...

Sheep are like private clouds

It's another double win. If you install solar panels on land sheep are currently grazing, not only can the sheep continue to graze there, they're actually *happier* (because of the shade and more diverse vegetation), and they produce more wool. Hmm, is that actually a triple win?

Explore the JVM track 👉 oredev.org/line-up?tags... From AI on the edge to lightning-fast runtimes 🪐 @adambien.blog 🪐 Adam Tornhill 🪐 @askowronski.bsky.social 🪐 @chrmelchior.bsky.social 🪐 @hansolo.eu 🪐 @coduinix.bsky.social 🪐 @hollycummins.com ns.com 🪐 James Ward 🪐 @starbuxman.joshlong.com

"In retrospect my recommendation was based too heavily on superficial traits, and not enough on opposable thumbs." I'm dying over here. 🤣

🎙️#GOTOpodcast: @hollycummins.com & @ogkittylyst.bsky.social dig into Optimizing Cloud Native Java: ⚡ Why performance tuning is as much psychology as tech 📊 How to measure what matters 🧵 Virtual threads & Java’s concurrency future Listen: gotopia.tech/podcast

LLMs have perfected the art of being confidently wrong, but they didn't invent it. For 13 years, Merriam-Webster included the word "dord". Never heard of a dord? It's not a thing. Why was "dord" in a dictionary? A chemist told Merriam-Webster researchers "D or d" were synonyms for "density". 🤦

Snake-in-the-Box Problem xkcd.com/3125/

Oh but it's beautiful.

Wheeee! 🇧🇪

Confession time. When I get the InfoQ weekly newsletter, I read through to see if I'm in it. I was just telling myself how silly I was for doing such a vain, futile, thing, and ... there I was, in the newsletter. (Each newsletter has a *lot* of links so it's not surprising I'm sometimes included.)

Oh rats, I just spotted, a month too late, that I had the wrong QR code for my London Java Quarkus slides. Um, if anyone wants the demo code and slides, they're actually here: hollycummins.com/langchain4j-...

New laptop misery. My IDE is causing all sorts of formatting chaos, because some formatting settings didn't migrate. I do not wish to think about formatting, hand-revert formatting churn, or fuss with IDE formatting settings. *Why* have the ecosystems (apart from Go) not sorted this out by now? 😭

@sannegrinovero.bsky.social‬'s career wisdom: make yourself replaceable, interview regularly, and truly listen. These aren't just tech lead tips - they're growth principles. When you enable others to succeed without you, you create space for bigger challenges. techleadjournal.dev/episodes/220/

Here’s an opportunity to work with some fantastic engineers!

Guardrail messages:" A Noodle is not a SNAKE". I can't argue with that. Good job I've got guardrails.

Me too, me too!

The cloud moves fast, which is a gift, but without guardrails, it turns into sprawl - resources pile up without owners - security decisions drift - costs surge Most organizations have the tools - what they're missing is the system that brings it all together

The wisdom of @hollycummins.com

Just submitted for #DevoxxBe, two whole weeks ahead of the deadline. I have to hope my family don't see the proposal, or it will be one of those awkward "Holly, why do you always do this kind of demo to yourself?" conversations at home. 😅