The Big Data Scare

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I came across this article on Tech Crunch today (AI accountability needs action now, say UK MPs) and wanted to share some thoughts on it. It sounds to me like once again Europe, and UK in this case, is getting cold feet about AI and big data and the interesting results this renders sometimes. Because […]

Goodies in Groovy from DefaultGroovyMethods

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If you ever programmed in Groovy language, you probably “enjoyed” (maybe without realising) the joys of DefaultGroovyMethods. What you probably don’t realise is that you can override these methods to customize your classes — and occasionally generate some code that’s not that easy to read. (Do you remember the old C++ way of overriding operators […]

On Java Annotations and Type Safety

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Nicolas Fränkel published a blog entry recently talking about “Type-safe annotations” in Java — which trigger my thoughts on the same matter, and voila, there’s this post as a result of it. This is in fact my 2 cents on the matter — and as such I’d recommend you read Nicolas’ point of view too […]

Small Note on gradle’s afterEvaluate

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If you use gradle and you took the path to write your own gradle plugins (try it, it’s fun!) to make your build process more … “enjoyable”, then this might come in handy one day. I have worked on a few gradle plugins, some of them inside the Netflix Nebula suite, some of them outside Netflix […]

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Java … FunctionalInterface … WTF?

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If you’ve been doing “stuff” with Java 8 for a while I’m sure you’ve stepped into lambdas territory and the joys of succinct code it allows to be written. And if you are like me you probably found yourself using lambda’s everywhere you are confronted with a single-method interface. Which is allowed. In fact it’s […]

Why You Should Use Default Methods in Java 8 Interfaces

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With Java 8, Oracle introduced the concept of “default methods” in interfaces (and if you really haven’t heard of this — wtf?? — you can read more here about it: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/defaultmethods.html). This argue some is a step towards multiple inheritance and as such should be banished from the oh, so pure! Java language. Others point out […]

London Underground

Liv’s Guide to London

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I was asked recently by a couple of friends on this side of the Atlantic about suggestions regarding London — as they were planning their London trip. I put together an email with basic pointers and sent it to my first friend. Shortly after it turns out another one decides he wants to visit Blighty and […]