frog707
Tinkering in Public
An open-source java devlog with occasional humor
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phantom-provocateur
Don't Like It? Just Plug Your Ears.
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Definitely someone else’s fault. Back to haxxing.
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how to work with your manager
The latest issue of Dev Leader Weekly is now available! Check out my free weekly software engineering newsletter!
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Change is the enemy of uptime.
#war stories#system administrator#website#nginx#site management#teething#troubleshooting#caching#uptime#reliability
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more Kotlin progress
As mentioned, I'm teaching myself the Kotlin programming language.
I've now converted 16 small, open-source Java apps to Kotlin. I've learned a lot along the way, but the process is becoming repetitive.
Part of me feels I ought to do a "senior project" in which I write and debug a medium-sized app from scratch, so I can cross "learn Kotlin" off my to-do list. That'd be fine if I needed a medium-sized app right now, but I don't!
Recall that my motivation for studying Kotlin was to maintain Gradle build scripts. For me, writing Kotlin apps is like a side quest. It's important to keep focus!
Also, for me writing apps, Kotlin's advantages over Java are negated by the limited support for Kotlin in Apache NetBeans:
+ no auto-completion
+ no code formatter
+ no automated code inspection
+ no debugger
At some point I'll experiment with Kotlin in Intellij IDEA, but not today!
#kotlin#java#conversion#software development#open source#self study#senior project#gradle#side quests#intellij#making progress#debugger#stay focused#not today#apache#coding#to do list
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Kotlin progress
As mentioned earlier, I'm teaching myself the Kotlin programming language. Since my main interest in Kotlin is to use it in build scripts, I've gone about this in a peculiar and roundabout way:
On Friday I created my first Kotlin project, based on BasicGame-on-Gradle (my template project at GitHub). This involved converting 2 (simple) build scripts from Groovy to Kotlin and translating one (very simple) app from Java to Kotlin. I managed this with help from the Gradle and Stack Overflow websites.
Over the weekend, I tried converting the build scripts of a few more projects, but found this harder than expected.
Then I got distracted by buildscript refactoring for a few days.
Today (Wednesday) I successfully converted the build scripts of my Maud and jme3-maze projects at GitHub. I chose these projects because they're particularly simple: no libraries to publish and no subprojects.
After all that I finally took the Kotlin tour.
Then I created Kotlin versions of 2 Java apps in my LbjExamples project.
While I'm still too much of a newbie to be making judgments about Kotlin, I'm liking it so far. It's more concise than Java, since it doesn't require so many semicolons and "new" keywords.
On the other hand, Kotlin is less mature than Java. I'm doing without many of the development tools I'm used to. Those lacks might be because I'm working in a NetBeans development environment. I gather Intellij IDEA supports Kotlin better than NetBeans does.
#kotlin#self study#software development#open source#github#accomplishments#gradle#java#groovy#my projects#conversion#intellij#applications#newbie#semicolon#coding#computer programming#making progress#stack overflow
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GitHub spammer
Today the discussion board at jmonkeyengine's GitHub repository was hit by a spammer. I'd never seen GitHub spam before, and I hope to never see it again!
I'm not sure why the repo even has a discussion board. It's not like there's much traffic, since 90% of the project's discussions take place via Discourse. (Another 9% take place in Discord chat.) Prior to today, the GitHub board had 2 posts.
By the time I discovered the spam, the spammer's account had been deleted, so there was no action for me to take against the account. All I could do was delete the posts, which I did. There were about 8 or 9 posts, all very similar and easily recognized as spam.
I doubt the spammer benefited in any way from all this waste of time and bandwidth. What a pathetic piece of shit they must be!
#people suck#github#spammers#discussion#open source#discourse#discord chat#new ways#repository#time wasted#piece of shit
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moving target
Today I learned that my decision to study Kotlin has coincided with the release of its new "K2" compiler front-end, a change that has been "in the works" for a couple years.
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when i say “forever” i’m only referring to data that you either don’t need or actively want gone. data you actually care about will disappear in seconds and somehow be fully unrecoverable. this is due to an ancient and planet-wide curse that cannot be lifted. thank you for studying computer science with me today
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Hello, Kotlin!
I'm teaching myself a new programming language, sort of.
It's called Kotlin, and you can read about it here and here.
I've used dozens of programming languages in my life. Lately I've been using Java for about 90% of my work, with the other 10% split between C++ and various scripting languages. It feels like I'm out-of-practice with more languages than I ever learned!
I actually need to learn only enough Kotlin to write Gradle build scripts. I've been using Gradle's Groovy DSL (=domain-specific language) for many years, and Gradle recently announced that, going forward, their Kotlin DSL would be the default. But since Kotlin is a GPL (=general-purpose language), I may try writing apps in it as well.
Because Kotlin is very similar to both Java and Groovy, it doesn't quite feel like a new language to me.
#coding#programming languages#java#groovy#c++ language#kotlin#gradle#scripting#self education#self study#software#gpl#familiar
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what did i do?
#screen caps#computer software#computer security#calculator#funny#unexpected#error message#desktop apps#linux#programmer humor
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Everything is a verb
Yes, even "dogfood"!
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Perfection is overrated
Yesterday I released version 8.1.0 of Minie, my 3-D physics library. It had been 88 days since the previous release. During that time I'd invested a lot of effort into investigating bugs, most of which are solved in the new release. But not all of them, not entirely.
Releasing with a significant, known bug cuts against the grain. Part of me imagines a much better version of Minie might be just a few days away. On the other hand, a project of this size (about 220 kLoC) is bound to contain thousands of bugs. Also, I'm confident v8.1.0 is substantially better than its predecessor. Perfection is a guidestar, not a reachable destination.
Then this morning I re-read "The perfectionism trap" (an Economist article from 2021). Among my favorite passages:
Serge Leclaire, a French psychoanalyst, posited the intriguing idea that life sets us the task of metaphorically killing this wonderful child. We must continually renounce the fantasy of an ideal self and grieve its impossibility.
#perfectionism#software development#accomplishments#coding#software bugs#the economist#new release#grief#metaphor
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The Chief Engineer knows software.
We all assume the first.
But, speaking professionally, the second is far more likely.
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Happy 60th!
BASIC was my first programming language.
#programming languages#computing history#information technology#1960s#trs 80#microcomputer#anniversary#ars technica
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Kaspersky and the human side
Following up on "Kaspersky and pride", here is the analysis of the social engineering side of the XZ backdoor exploit:
As both a maintainer of and a contributor to open-source software, much of the discussion quoted seems very familiar:
Complaints about the software release process being slow.
2. Complaints that the maintainer has lost interest or doesn't care any more.
#kaspersky#open source#software engineering#social engineering#xz#backdoor#complaints#apathy#isolation#psychology
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Kaspersky and pride
Kaspersky Labs is a cybersecurity firm with headquarters in Moscow.
Here's their technical analysis of the famous XZ backdoor that Andres Freund (of Microsoft) discovered back in March:
It's a fascinating chain of coding wizardry.
The big question is: who was "Jia Tan", the person or team who planted the backdoor? An article in The Economist (which has an anti-Russia bias) amplified speculation that it was Russia’s foreign-intelligence service (while admitting "the evidence is too weak to nail down a culprit").
The Economist article ends by quoting Michal Zalewski: “The bottom line is that we have untold trillions of dollars riding on top of code developed by hobbyists.”
As an open-source software developer, I get a weird thrill from news stories about FOSS, even when the stories are alarming. Not that I've ever worked on anything as crucial as XZ or Log4j, mind you! But seeing an obscure subject (which I care deeply about) getting public attention ... causes me to feel better about my hobby.
Pride. That's what I'm getting at.
It's the same feeling I felt when saw a website URL on a billboard for the first time. This was in the mid-90s, when the World Wide Web was an obscure novelty that I happened to be studying. Seeing a company advertise its website validated my (professional) interest in HTTP servers.
#open source#software development#coding#computer security#xz#kaspersky#backdoor#linux#the economist#pride#my hobby
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Coder challenge
If the source code lacks comments, how can you be sure setBuilder() isn't actually cake?
#is it cake#programmer humor#software development#comments#documentation#cake#epistemology#source code#coding#computer programming
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