In addition to the built-in environment variables available by default in Google Cloud Workflows (like the project ID, the location, the workflow ID, etc.) it’s now possible to define your own custom environment variables! Why is it useful and important? It’s particularly handy when you want to read information that is dependent on the deployment of your workflow, like, for example, information about the environment you’re running in. Is my workflow running in development, staging, or production environment? Read more...

Last week, I wrote about how to get started with the PaLM API in the Java ecosystem, and particularly, how to overcome the lack of Java client libraries (at least for now) for the PaLM API, and how to properly authenticate. However, what I didn’t explain was what I was building! Let’s fix that today, by telling you a story, a kid story! Yes, I was using the trendy Generative AI approach to generate bedtime stories for kids. Read more...

When developing new projects on my laptop, I often run some commands over and over again. Regardless of how far you’ve gone with your CI/CD pipelines, running commands locally without resorting to becoming a bash ninja can be pretty easy with… just! just is a handy way to save and run project-specific commands It’s a command-line tool that lets you define some commands to run (called recipes), in the form of a Makefile-inspired syntax. Read more...

Large Language Models (LLMs for short) are taking the world by storm, and things like ChatGPT have become very popular and used by millions of users daily. Google came up with its own chatbot called Bard, which is powered by its ground-breaking PaLM 2 model and API. You can also find and use the PaLM API from withing Google Cloud as well (as part of Vertex AI Generative AI products) and thus create your own applications based on that API. Read more...

When using Google Maps, you might have seen those strange little codes, as in the screenshot above. This is a plus code, or to use the more official name, an Open Location Code. It’s a way to encode a location in a short and (somewhat) memorable form. In countries like France, every house has an official address, so you can easily receive letters or get some parcel delivered. But there are countries where no such location system exists, so you have to resort to describing where you live (take this road, turn right after the red house, etc. Read more...

As cURL was celebrating its 25th birthday, I was reading Daniel Stenberg’s story behind the project, and discovered a neat little feature I hadn’t heard of before: the --json flag! Daniel even blogged about it when it landed in cURL 7.82.0 last year. So what’s so cool about it? If you’re like me, you’re used to post some JSON data with the following verbose approach: curl --data '{"msg": "hello"}' \ --header "Content-Type: application/json" \ --header "Accept: application/json" \ https://example. Read more...

For some scripting tasks, my favorite go-to tool is the Groovy Console, and writing code with Apache Groovy. Usually, you just spill some println calls all over the place to display some textual information. But there’s a little known secret. Not really secret though, as it’s properly documented. It’s possible to display images (like BufferedImage or its parent java.awt.Image) or all sorts of rich components (from the Swing UI toolkit, like JPanel, JLabel, etc. Read more...

I regularly use both IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio Code as my environments for developing. But like all tools, we often need to personalise them to our liking, to feel at ease, or to be more productive. As we read code more than we write, there are certain settings in your favorite editor to improve your reading experience. Today, I’ll share of the tweaks I’ve made to my VS Code settings. Read more...

I started blogging 20 years ago, in April 2003. My first blog engine was a PHP CMS, called Nucleus. I was hosting it on my ISP, at free.fr. Then in 2011, I wrote my own blog engine, called Bloogaey, which was written in Groovy, using my little Gaelyk web framework, and running on App Engine. As it became a bit painful to properly format my blog posts, and evolve my blog engine, I decided I should move to something that is more static, with a static site generator that eats Markdown files: I chose the Hugo static site generator that I used in some previous projects. Read more...

With the turmoil around Twitter, like many, I’ve decided to look into Mastodon. My friend Geert is running his own Mastodon server, and welcomed me on his instance at: uwyn.net/@glaforge. With Twitter, you can access your analytics to know how your tweets are doing, how many views you’re getting. Working in developer relations, it’s always interesting to get some insights into those numbers to figure out if what you’re sharing is interesting for your community. Read more...