Recent content in Home on 57R1N9p00L
LLMs are a weird thing. You can love and hate them at the same time. I’ve come to realize that LLMs can indeed be valuable tools, but they also disrupt programming as a craft in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. The real insight isn’t whether LLMs are good or bad. It’s that their value is highly circumstantial and depends entirely on the expertise of the person wielding…
I have been using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as my only OS with the Btrfs file system for a few months now, coming from Ubuntu. While the system generally feels more performant, I sporadically experienced random freezes without any correlation to specific actions. It could happen while working in the IDE, browsing, or writing. Annoying, but manageable. Until yesterday. The screen froze once again, but…
I have been acquainted with the Windows OS since my early computer days. Since then, I used Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, 7, 10 and 11. Early on, Windows always felt like it was without alternative. Mostly because I might have been not knowledgeable enough to engage with the existing Linux distributions of that time. On the other hand, I had no good reason to abandon Windows or question Windows as my…
I am currently seven month into my Kagi subscription, and it is time for a short review of this rather unusual service. If you have not heard of Kagi, it is a search engine with a subscription model. At Kagi they claim to put you first, since your subscription to the service effectively runs the company. There is no data selling, no data usage, no advertisements, no user-tracking. They only…
Recently I was faced with the question on how to efficiently load images in a Vaadin Flow app, that can dynamically be changed by the users. As you might have suspected we are talking about simple user profile pictures. The images are supposed to be held private and only be available for logged-in users. Thus, the means which provide the images are supposed to be under control of the Vaadin…
More recently I have started using the Vaadin Flow framework in version 24 to build a corporate application. One of the first challenges I stumbled upon when building a user interface was creating a global footer that is simply present on all other views. The user interface in Vaadin is usually build from the common root AppLayout component which is to be extended from a main view class. This…
Back in the days (1995) Java`s main selling point was its cross-platform capability. Nowadays, many programming languages like Go or Python can match this. The same is true for other features when viewed in isolation. Indeed, it will be hard to find a feature that is unique to Java. But the same is true for many other modern languages. Some might have their strengths in certain areas, and a…
Integration tests are an integral part of software testing, being responsible for joint testing of different parts of the application. Hence, they usually require the application (partially) running with all the attached strings like a database connection. Now, depending on your application, it might be necessary to maintain a clean data sleeve between different integration test classes in oder to…
When building a REST API with typical CRUD operations you will sooner or later be faced with a situation in which you need to authorize only certain users on certain endpoints. In Spring Boot this can be achieved by utilizing method security features e.g. by using the @PreAuthorize annotation in combination with the in-built hasRole() method which checks for specified roles in Spring`s security…
Recently I had a problem in my professional role. While looking into alternatives to Docker Desktop, I gave Podman a shot and was quite satisfied from the start. Although a few tweaks were necessary to solve the transition from docker-compose the only real issue I had was unfortunately also quite severe. Whenever I turned on my corporate VPN connection it was impossible to get any connection to…
A curated list of interesting links I have stumbled upon. b3nh0y7 - A personal website by Ben Hoyt, a software developer who writes about the beauty of the “small web” c45p4rwr3 - Criticism of Google Analytics’ tracking practices with alternative suggestions by Caspar Wrede h0r57m4nn - Java-related website by Cay S. Horstmann, a fellow Java developer with a lot of content on the…
Here we go again. After several attempts over the past years to establish a longer-lasting, tiny presence on the web for myself, I landed with yet another idea on how to do it. This time I got inspired by an article I read from Parimal Satyal on “Rediscovering the small web”. Written back in 2020, but only recently read by me, it inspired me to think of the old days, when I got first…
It is being predicted that quantum computers pose a threat to the security of today’s encryption methods and therefore to the security of digital communication. But how could these potential threats materialize? What is the state of research in the field of post-quantum cryptography and which systems will be affected first? To answer this, we should first take a look at what distinguishes…
Software development is surrounded by a myriad of methods, process models, ecosystems, plugins, languages, architectures, and best practices. On top of that, the entire field is constantly changing: new requirements, new programming languages, new tools. And where can you actually find trained specialists for all these technologies these days? Many factors contribute to the fact that in-house…
The topic of quantum computing (QC) has raised great expectations over the years (1), but its commercial use still seems largely limited. However, a closer look reveals that the second quantum revolution, the productive application of quantum mechanical principles in information processing, is already feasible. Google, one of the drivers behind commercially viable quantum computers, demonstrated…