I recently joined a different team at work, working on a whole different project. For the past one to one and a half year, I did my bit in building up a culture in my old teams regarding code quality and the moral responsibility of a developer towards the codebase (also known as boy scout principle). Now, we have to start all over from scratch with the new team.

TL;DR: I created a wrapper for Apache Kafka so that it can be installed as a Windows Service. In this post I also describe a bit what Kafka is.

As a Maven rookie, I often use the quickstart archetype from Maven when I want to create a new Maven project. Unfortunately, that archetype is a bit outdated, which means I have to tweak some details before I can actually use it. I guess I got a bit tired of this and I thought I could create my own archetype that is ready to use.

TL;DR: I wrote a bash script that walks through your git repository history and calculates number of commits, number of merged pull requests, number of files and total number of lines of code, broken down per month.

In a previous post, I was discussing a way to publish an npm package to the public npm registry. A big prerequisite for that to work is that you have previously logged in to the CI server in order to authenticate against npm. But we can also fix that manual step and integrate it in the build.

During the past year at work, we did a complete rewrite of our websites from scratch. Not only did we aim to build a mobile-first responsive website with high performance, we also tried to do it with continuous integration and continuous deployment in mind. All that on a proprietary platform not built with CI in mind. This was a very big challenge, which involved a culture change in a lot of people. Unfortunately, the project had a hard deadline. Things were left out. Corners were cut.

Taking a backup was arguably easier back in the days. You had only one computer, your data could fit inside a few floppy disks and the only cloud in your life was the one that would indicate chances of rain later in the afternoon. Things are a bit different today. Nevertheless, the need to preserve your files, your work, and your digital memories, remains the same.

I spent the previous week migrating some old code I had laying around into GitHub. More specifically, I had a single git repository named “Legacy” that contained all sorts of projects and demos I had created over the years. It’s difficult to find exact dates but I found a few that go as back as 1998, so I can justify the title of this blog post.

This post shows how to create a simple web application with maven.

I have a small mini PC at home that is always turned on. It runs Ubuntu 14.04 (I plan to upgrade to 16.04). It sits at the living room and it doesn’t make any noise, so it acts as a media server. I watch movies and TV series from there. I used 3 external disks, 2TB each, to make a ZFS raidz1 pool of 4TB. What is ZFS you ask?