The blog

What's up? (January 2021)

Keyboard Playing has been calm for some months in 2020. It was however not forgotten. It’s alive again and some changes were made in the last weeks.

New Transformations for the Download Proxy

Last year, I posted about the v2.0 of the Download Proxy. At the time, the main event was the change of the technological stack and a restricted set of transformations. Today, I happily publish a version 2.1. Here are the main changes.

[Best practice] Use Constructor-Based Dependency Injection with Spring

If you’ve been using Spring for a while, or copy-pasting some web tutorials or examples, you’ve probably put some @Autowired annotations on private fields. This does work, but it’s not the best way to do it.

Managing a personal project

As a developer, I’ve had my share of side projects but, being the lone wolf I am, I always worked alone on those. This year, the creative community I’m part of decided on achieving something that would require some work. I thought I had a quite clear vision and decided to manage this project.

Here’s what I take away from it.

Installing Scrivener 3 on Linux

As I’m preparing for my first attempt at NaNoWriMo, I know I must have my writing software ready. I used Scrivener in the past and know it’s a solution I love to use. My only problem was: my mobility OS is Linux, which Scrivener doesn’t provide support for.

But that’s no longer a problem as Thomas Pletcher proved that the latest betas of Scrivener 3 work with Wine. Here’s how.

Trim trailing spaces in MS Word and LibreOffice

If you like to deliver clean documents, you probably sometimes display invisible characters in Word. In such occasions, you may have seen lines or paragraphs ending with ·¶. Yes, because a document is not only written but also manipulated and changed a number of times, having trailing spaces is not a rare thing. One of my development reflexes is to trim those, but Word does not provide any tool to do that automatically. Or does it?

Make Sure These Node Modules Are Those You Wanted

Sometimes, I don’t understand something, so I search the answer and sharing it is natural. Sometimes, I don’t think sharing it will be any use, until I realize that some people, even in my team, struggle with the same thing. This post is in the second category.

If you use NPM regularly, you must have noticed it adds tildes (~) or carets (^) in front of your dependencies' version number. You may also have noticed it creates a package-lock.json file. If you don’t know what any of these are, this post will shed some light.

Formatting Dialogue

Following the usual rules when writing a dialogue in a piece of fiction makes it so much easier to read. Fortunately, those rules are quite straightforward. Much more so than their French equivalent.

The Download Proxy's Back

A few years back, I had problems downloading files I needed in order to work. It’s not uncommon for developers to have higher access rights on their machine, but this almost never applies to the firewall. So, you may have the right to install all software you need and yet still be unable to download it without a two-day-long exchange with a security service located in another city. That’s annoying. And that’s when I came up with the Download Proxy.

Keyboard Playing's Technological Stack

Last week, Tony asked me about the technological stack behind my website. It’s a subject I wanted to write about once the website was stable, but I keep tinkering with it. As such, it’s far from finished and I still have many ideas, but let’s talk about it now nonetheless.

How to Choose Your OJDBC Driver

When you develop a Java program that accesses a database, you’re likely to need a JDBC driver. When that database is an Oracle product, you keep that O for OJDBC.

For years, I just used the version an architect had selected. Then, I became the architect and I had to understand which version to choose. It’s not that complicated, just not really well explained. Let me try to contribute…

What's up? (February 2020)

It’s been a while since I last posted an update about the website. Not my favorite kind of post, but you’ll see I’ve not been entirely idle.

Use editorconfig for Your Formatting Configuration

Today’s Valentine’s day, the best day in the year to tell you how I fell in love with editorconfig.

We Are Creating the Future

To conclude this series about sustainable digital, I wanted to write a bit about some impacts of software creation that we rarely think about. We’ve all seen movies where a mad scientist creates something that they think is awesome until it escapes their control and threatens life as we know it.

Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. David Cronenberg

That’s especially true about us software creators: we innovate, create new technologies for thousands or millions of people. If we’re not careful about those creations, they may transform the whole society, though not necessarily in the way we assumed they would.

Data Is the New Oil

Every project we hear about these days seems to be about data—or artificial intelligence, which is mainly the same. Data is not something new, but the enthusiasm about it is growing rapidly. People are not always aware of how much a website or an application is collecting about them, pushing legislators to write laws about what a company can and can’t do with a user’s data.

Why is that the problem of software creators? Well, the mere amount of data we now collect could never be processed in a lifetime without our digital skills. That makes us at least partly responsible for what is done with it.

The Role of Software Creators for a Sustainable Digital

Last week, I posted about the environmental footprint of digital. Most of it may have seemed pretty hardware considerations—and several companies or associations fight for more modular, repairable and globally speaking sustainable electronics.

Now, you’re willing to help, but you can’t see how you can make a difference because work on software exclusively and have no say about the hardware that it’ll run on? This post will give you some hints about how to include these considerations into the design of your application.

The Footprint of the Digital World

Last month, I had the opportunity to talk about a topic I hold dear: how to make our job part of something sustainable. This is something I’ve planned to share and I thought the period of the new year’s resolutions may be a great time to do it.

So, before going any further, let’s begin with why the idea of sustainable development should even be a question in the digital field.

A Review of My 2019 Readings

The end of the year is a good time for assessments. A good one is, “what have I learned this year?” IT is a field that keeps moving, and we need to stay up to date if we don’t want to drown. In our culture, most of our knowledge is stored and shared through writing, so a part of my question becomes, “what have I read that was enlightening this year?”

Learn the Technology, not the Framework

I’ve discussed with several people, this year. Technical leads, technical supervisors, architects… You get the gist. Among those discussions, I heard a recurring complaint, which I previously feared to be my demanding nature expressing itself.

But no! Other people noticed it too, and it basically boils down to something like this: we’re facing a new generation of developers, who like to do things fast and don’t care much about how things work deep down, and we’re living in an era proposing a new framework to help them go faster and not understand. The two together won’t make for great developers. Good developers, maybe, but not great ones.

Choose Your Font for Coding

We developers often spend a great deal of attention choosing our tools: computer, editors… Yet, we often fail to see the gain of choosing an appropriate font.

Here is some food for thoughts on this topic, and some of my favorite coding fonts.