R.J. Lorimer

Project Wakefield is the effort to build support for the Wayland display server in the JDK, allowing Java-based desktop apps to be native Wayland clients. This project has moved from an interesting effort with some momentum, to a far more important project than ever before.

Largely motivated by Virtual Threads, a new lightweight thread-local alternative has been introduced with the incubation JEP-429 called ScopedValues. ScopedValue is purpose-built to provide a lighter-weight alternative to ThreadLocal that works well with virtual threads and also solves multiple API shortcomings of the twenty-five year old counterpart. This article will dive in to how ScopedValue is different, and how it is made faster under the covers.

Recently I moved all of my personal setups to NixOS, from my Framework laptop, my gaming desktop, and my work MacOS setup. However, my laptop recently was no longer able to rebuild or re-apply, due to weird Nix errors.

One of the major benefits of Kotlin as a JVM language is that you can use any and all Java libraries natively. However, sometimes, Kotlin has better (or at least more idiomatic) alternatives to the native Java libraries. Over the years, I’ve coached a lot of Java developers at various experience levels on how to effectively use Kotlin, and it’s a very common pattern for them to not know the standard Kotlin library and choose the “Java way” instead of the “Kotlin way”. This article will cover some of the more common cases where I see that happen.

Sometimes it’s fun to try a new challenge, and sometimes it is fun to mix a few challenges together.