Recent Posts

SBT Parallel Compile Optimizations using Quill Sub-Projects

8 minute read

Scala is slow to compile. Advanced syntax constructs and a robust type system can increase developer productivity and runtime reliability but also create extra work for the compiler. Macro libraries such as Quill are effectivily programs written for the compiler, and can represent an unbounded amount of work depending on what they are trying to accomplish. Are there ways to structure our Scala 3 code to ensure that we can embrace the rich macro ecosystem without excessively long compile times?

ZIO Migration from Akka and Scala Futures

6 minute read

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Akka / Apache Pekko is a robust and popular Scala framework used to build concurrent production-grade software. One of the concurrency primatives it uses is the standard scala.concurrent.Future class. Before these existed in Scala, there was the Twitter Future offering similiar, but expanded functionality including cancellation / interruptibility. Ignoring the functional coding style promoted by ZIO for a second, the concurrency primative used by ZIO, known as ZIO[R, E, A] can be viewed as a more advanced Future[A].

Akka gRPC with Let’s Encrypt

3 minute read

The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) has recommendations about encrypting the web; there is no reason to be running servers over unencrypted HTTP any longer. It is irresponsible to your users and unnecessary, as such there is a a formal mechanism called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) that enforces HTTPS for all requests at the domain level. Taking it further, modern browsers include a set of domains which can only work over HTTPS, it started with Google TLDs such as .dev and .app, but it is growing https://hstspreload.org/.

Trade Audit Mobile App Infrastructure

3 minute read

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The release of the Trade Audit mobile app is almost here. It is currently in MVP stage, but its infrastructure is a pretty typical cloud based deployment. This article discusses design choices made, evaluating how effective they were.

Lit Custom Components for SVG Generation

4 minute read

SVG markup is very similar to HTML, and the Lit Web Components library can be used to not only generate HTML custom components, but also manipulate SVG in a similar way using Lit templates. Lit is a small 5kb library that removes the boilerplate code of DOM generation, and is highly interoperable with all web frameworks since it relies on browser native custom elements.

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) Domains on GitHub Pages

4 minute read

GitHub Pages is free hosting for static content webpages, and a cost effective way to publish micro-sites for all of your projects. Can it handle custom domains, and HSTS domains? How about multiple custom HSTS domains?

JVM versus Python for AWS Lambda Functions

3 minute read

The suitability of programming languages across different domains is a contested topic. AWS Lambda Functions are a serverless solution that can be used for a wide range of problems from tiny to large tasks. For lightweight tasks how does the JVM stack up?

Scala 3 and AWS Lambda Functions

5 minute read

AWS Lambda offer the ability to run code functions without a server. Basically standalone functions that receive JSON as a parameter and have up to 15 minutes to do anything. The source of the JSON event can be anything, AWS has configured most of their AWS products to emit events; for example uploading a file to S3 creates JSON that contains information about the file. Lambdas are meant to be simple and short-lived code snippets, so each Lambda can only listen to 1 source for events (although you can proxy multiple types of events through a single source). The most generic source for events is to listen to HTTP requests on a public URL, and we’ll cover how that can be done in this article.

Downloading from GitHub Packages using HTTP and Maven

4 minute read

GitHub Packages is a Maven compatible repository and is accessible independent of GitHub. This article expands on alternative access to these files through direct download URLs and HTTP browsing using Maven metadata, and how to effectively use the free tier for private repositories.

Scala SBT Publishing to GitHub Packages

8 minute read

GitHub Packages is a natural extension of a CI/CD pipeline created in GitHub Action. It currently offers repositories for Java (Maven), .Net (NuGet), Ruby (Gems), Javascript (npm), and Docker images. For a lot of users this can be a free private service if you can squeeze under the size limitation and are okay using OAuth keys managed in GitHub.

Emoji Progress Bar for SaaS Integrations

2 minute read

The command line progress bar was the first step towards graphical UI. It was an exciting addition to a numerical percent ticking away as a running task took forever to complete. It started with safe for everywhere ascii characters

Is Javascript Replacing HTML?

7 minute read

Over time there has been an ebb and flow to the ratio of Javascript:HTML used in websites. What motivates the change, and where is this ratio ultimately headed?