Had an impromptu catchup today with a former colleague. It was really great catching up, but unfortunately, it was overshadowed by the news that two of my former mentors have passed. I'm still trying to take it in. If nothing else, it's a wakeup to try and keep up with people.

There's one week left to read "Eclipse Collections Categorically" on Kindle Unlimited for free. Read the authors inside guide to reading first to find out how to make the most out of reading the book with limited time. donraab.medium.com/the-authors-...

Gem of a track. youtu.be/oRkRwL0vjOg?...

A project template is halfway round the world while a design principle is putting its boots on.

I've been working a bit with just pure Java and a few trusty libs for the last couple of days, and it's a real breath of fresh air. No DI frameworks to worry about, just some good old TDD programming with JUnit, Eclipse Collections, Hikari, the postgres driver, and the AWS client. I've missed this.

100% agreed. Whenever I touch npm or pip, I see why Maven (and Gradle) and the Java ecosystem are good the way they are. We're even getting trusted checksums in Maven 4! Like a "proper" package-lock...

I'm not sure how this is comfortable, but oh well.

4 factors that are reasonably good predictors of which code is likely to break: 1. Complexity (more to go wrong) 2. Coupling (greater risk of breaking changes) 3. Change (the more often code changes, the great the risk) 4. Test Assurance - how thoroughly and how often it's being tested) (1/3)

UK right now

Join @zakhav.bsky.social and myself tomorrow at 10:45am in Salon FGH to learn why and how we've written #Java code with #EclipseCollections for the past 21 years. I brought a couple paperback copies of "Eclipse Collections Categorically" to give away at the end of our session. Hope to see u there! 🙏

Oh, great. After a premature end to a holiday, I've now got what seems to look like a snapped coil spring (and possibly the adjoining suspension and tires) to contend with.

Interesting conversation with a chat bot earlier (paraphrased to remove specifics): "Are you X or Y?" [Proceeds to provide "yes" and "no" as the only 2 acceptable answers]. A few moments later when I insisted on speaking to somebody, it asked if I was sure and proclaimed "I'm a smart bot, I promise"

Today I offer a reminder of the word ‘forswunk’ (13th century): exhausted from too much work. To be ‘foreswunk’ (my own version) is to be exhausted before you even begin.

To find out why a former Smalltalk developer open sourced and worked for 21 years on a collections framework for #Java, just read the Preface. Read the entire book to see what 21 years of OSS community effort can produce. Content up thru Chapter 1 is FREE online. 👇 read.amazon.com/sample/B0FFM...

Yep.

Brilliant! Now I can share this clip I took of a mole running, which has made me laugh more than I care to admit.

Too early, Steve. TOO EARLY!

"We use coding agents like junior developers". Cool. So you get the dual benefits of it being slower than an experienced developer to get a half-decent result *and* it never learns. Bargain!

This bubble just needs to burst. We've got about as much value from the current wave of LLMs and Gen AI in general that we can do. It's time to divert money back towards actually important things, IMO (*cough climate! *cough)

I highly recommend this book. It's not just a great guide to EC, but a great resource on API design, too (among other things). If you're interested in writing Java that's not only more efficient but also more concise, you can't pass this up.

ChatGPT apologized for stealing the plums from the icebox and promised to meet me at the breakfast table tomorrow at 9am with more plums. It's not going to do that. It's also not going to learn from my feedback and do better in the future.

If your most effective management skill is insisting people work 80 hours a week, you might want to consider learning some new management skills.

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I've overlooked this one.

The last holiday cat photo I managed to take. This little'un was a month and a half old; out of shot was its sibling (which it proceeded to play-fight with) and mother cat, keeping an eye on them both.

"I'm disappointed we haven't seen a hedgehog yet." A short moment later:

Another holiday (vacation) cat.

I was reading about adaptive programming today, a paradigm I've not come across before. I couldn't really think of a decent usecase for it, that can't be solved with better object design...

A nice start to the day. 6:30am start, a strong coffee and an hour-long walk which turned into a cat-spotting walk. I must have seen more than a dozen

[Realistic Monopoly]: There is a bank error in your favour. You have 15 seconds to navigate an endless series of AI chatbots and phone trees to try and correct this before you are sent to jail for eighty seven years.

Hmm. This is probably why I got stung the other day... a great big wasp nest, just to the right of the shed door. Fumigated it earlier, and they're still kicking - or at least a decent bunch of them are. I'm not sure where they're getting this T-1000 energy from, but these f****** need to go ASAP.

Apt.

I've managed to go 36 years without being stung by a wasp. Today, that streak was broken.

Venn diagram

It's already too hot and humid, and it looks like the temp will jump up by another 8°C tomorrow. I'm going to melt at this rate.

I'm of the opinion now that maven's install goal should be disabled unless you specify a flag of some sort. The sheer volume of issues it causes with multi module projects alone should prompt a discussion. From my perspective:

Happy cat

The reason you don't have time to write unit tests is because you didn't write unit tests.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal. - John Steinbeck

Blog: Foreword and Onward to Your Next Connection I share advice & personal examples of connections I've made over 25 years. 🙏 @josepaumard.bsky.social @venkats.bsky.social @zakhav.bsky.social @sharatchander.bsky.social @malagupta.bsky.social @loiane.bsky.social donraab.medium.com/foreword-and...

Found this poor critter, barely moving in the garden. I fed it a little syrup and, a few minutes later, attempted to move it into the shade. After a brief second trying to coax it onto some paper, it took flight... straight into my upstairs bedroom window. Sigh.

#EclipseCollections 12.0 is in release review at @eclipse.org. Eclipse Collections Categorically (ECC) matte hardcover version (center👇) is up for pre-order on Barnes & Noble and will be GA on June 15. The Amazon Kindle version of ECC will be online on June 30. #Java forecast this summer is 🌞🏖️☕

UX 101: The best way for a system to handle user mistakes is to restrict them to valid choices. (e.g. an ATM that doesn't offer $30 withdrawal if it has no $10 notes) The second best way is to give the user an easy way back. (e.g. Undo) The worst way to handle user mistakes is to blame them.

I'm not sure if this is a sign of being middle-aged, but I'm pretty happy with the progress of this little hanging basket that I put up a week or so back. It's a nice little reminder to myself that we can do things just for the sake of adding a bit of colour and beauty to the world.

I throw up a little bit in my mouth when I see AI generated pictures now. I miss the joy of being surprised and mesmerized by the creativity of people with artistic talent. Art isn't a burger. It's much too special to be dispensed at a fast-art drive-thru. Maybe just me.

As far as left-overs meals go, this was pretty darn good. Some mac & cheese and a steak I cooked sous vide a little while back, kept vacuum packed and frozen.

It turns out the secret to getting it right is lowering the cost of getting it wrong.

Found an internal repo today that a colleague had made. Using GrallVM, they'd managed to get Nunjucks working as a rendering engine with Spring. Really cool!

May the fourth be with you...