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...

Probably like most of you, my dear readers, I have too many browser windows open, with tons of tabs for each window. But there are always apps I come back to very often, like my email (professional & personal), my calendar, my chat app, or even social media sites like Mastodon or Twitter. You can switch from window to window with CTRL/CMD-Tab, but you also have to move between tabs potentially. Read more...

I missed this talk from Alexandre Dubreuil, when attending Devoxx Belgium 2019, but I had the chance to watch while doing my elliptical bike run, confined at home. It’s about applying Machine Learning to music generation, thanks to the Magenta project, which is based on Tensorflow. I like playing music (a bit of piano & guitar) once in a while, so as a geek, I’ve also always been interested in computer generated music. Read more...

Doing sport at home on a treadmill or an elliptical bike is pretty boring, when you’re confined, so to make things more interesting, I’m watching some videos to learn something new while exercising. This time, I found this old video about how to decode QR codes… by hand! Have you ever thought how these were encoded? This video comes from the Robomatics YouTube channel. You recognise easily QR codes thanks to the 3 big squares with the inner white line. Read more...

At the end of December, I was contacted by someone I didn’t know, who asked me some interesting questions, and that led me to quite a bit of introspection. As a Java Champion and with your career history. I wanted to ask you what you consider are the most important skills for a Java programmer to have in their toolbox, especially a Senior Java programmer? Or maybe even a better question is what skills you developed that helped you become the Java Developer/Groovy Language Developer that you are today. Read more...

J’ai eu le plaisir d’encadrer des stagiaires de 3ème récemment chez Google. Nous accueillons des enfants, neveux, nièces, cousins d’employés de Google (donc non :-P, je ne prends pas de stagiaire, pas la peine de demander !!!) pour leur faire découvrir les différents métiers que nous exerçons dans l’entreprise. Et il y en a beaucoup ! L’un de mes stagiaires m’a interviewé lorsque je décrivais mon travail de “Developer Advocate”, au sein de Google Cloud. Read more...

Just before heading to Google Cloud Next, I was notified I was listed 4th in JAX London’s Top 20 Java influencers of 2018 on social media! It’s an honor to be listed among famous figures like Josh Bloch, Brian Goetze, Martin Thompson, Arun Gupta, Jessica Kerr, Mario Fusco, Josh Long, Venkat Subramanian, Charles Nutter and many others. You can see the full list of the top influencers here. I’ll definitely continue to advocate for Java (and Apache Groovy) developers around the world, and share whatever I learn along the way through articles or conference talks. Read more...

A few months ago, I had some fun doing the keynote of Voxxed Days Singapore and JUG Summer Camp, and I realized I didn’t get a chance to share my deck. Furthermore, the videos of both events are actually available online: one in English, one in French! I spoke about the so-called IT Holy Wars, you know, like Vi vs Emacs, Tabs & Spaces, or other funny things of that kind. Read more...

The Java Champions recently nominated me to become a Java Champion! Please welcome the new Java Champions. @antoine_sd @javajudd @glaforge @kenkousen @kito99 @vlad_mihalcea@leomrlima @net0pyr @shelajev @rgransberger @rmehmandarov @Sander_Mak @SeanMiPhillips Well done to all of you @OracleDevs @java #odevcommunity pic.twitter.com/X9yeek641s — Java Champions (@Java_Champions) November 22, 2017 There’s also a post on the Java Champions’ blog, and InfoQ also echoed the new nominees recently. I’m super happy and proud of this nomination, and I’m looking forward to continuing being involved in the Java ecosystem, present at Java-friendly conferences, contribute to Open Source projects using Java and Apache Groovy, and write articles here and there using my favorite languages. Read more...

I recently came across InstantServer.io, a nice little service that allows you to instantiate an Ubuntu server for testing, for 35 minutes, on Amazon EC2. You click on the green button, and you’re given an account and a password, as well as the details to connect onto the machine through SSH. Please note that the service seems to be victim of its success, as requesting a new server takes more and more time it seems. Read more...