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.

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. It even allows you to define dependencies between the various tasks of your justfile. It runs across all environments (Mac, Linux, Windows), and is quick to install. It loads .env files in which you can define variables specific to your project (other developers can have the same justfile but have variables specific for their projects)

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. However, if you look at the documentation, you’ll only find Python tutorials or notebooks, or also explanations on how to make cURL calls to the API. But since I’m a Java (and Groovy) developer at heart, I was interested in seeing how to do this from the Java world.

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.)

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.com

You have to pass the data, and also pass headers to specify the content-type. You can make it slightly shorter with the one-letter flags:

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.)

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.

You can edit some of the settings by opening the UI of the settings dialog box, but you can also edit the JSON file in which those settings are saved. On a Mac, for example, the settings.json file is stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/.

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. And I’m now hosting the content of my blog in Github Pages, under the glaforge.dev custom domain name.

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. But for various (actually good) reasons, Mastodon doesn’t offer such detailed analytics. However, I wanted to see what the Mastodon APIs offered.

This is a three-part series of posts, in which we summarize Workflows and service orchestration patterns. In this third and final post, we talk about managing workflow life cycles and the benefits of using Firestore with Workflows. 

Use subworkflows and Terraform to manage workflow definitions

If you’re not careful, the workflow definitions you create with YAML or JSON can get out of hand pretty quickly. While it is possible to use subworkflows to define snippets of a workflow that can be reused from multiple workflows, Workflows does not support importing these subworkflows. Thankfully, there are other tools, such as Terraform, that can help.