Some people think GUIs have replaced the command-line. But they have not, they are complementary. Some things can still be done better and easier in the command-line, for example scripting, and to servers one usually has access via an SSH terminal only. But there is more! This blog will describe a few very convenient commands for software developers. All of it works in the Bash shell (common on Linux), but most of it works in the Z shell (zsh) as well (common on Mac).

How to use Kotlin’s let and also functions.

The nice thing about the http command in Nushell is that you can interact with HTTP endpoints without the need to install any external tools. You can use several subcommands like get, post, put, delete and patch. Each of these commands has the options to specify request headers. You can use the option --headers or the short version -H followed by a list of header keys and values.

The http command in Nushell can be used to interact with HTTP endpoints. You can post data to an endpoint using the post subcommand. If you want to post JSON data than you can simply use a record data structure and use the argument --content-type application/json (or the shorthand -t application/json). Nushell will automatically convert the record data structure to JSON and use it as the body of the HTTP request.

The ultimate way to get rid of versioning administration is to use CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment). However, in many cases CD is not possible. For example when creating libraries, or software requiring versions for compliance reasons. Versioning is then still needed. This should be easy, but it turns out that without a proper procedure it can become very messy very fast. This blog will describe a simple set up of such a procedure based on trunk-based development and Semantic Versioning.

Flyway is convenient tool to manage your database changes. You can use it to create and populate your database from scratch, or to manage changes on a pre-existing database. You can add it to your application so that when it starts up it invokes Flyway, or you can use the command-line version. This blog describes a convenient way of using the Flyway command-line version.

When working with type parameters in Kotlin, you might encounter JVM signature clashes. This post explains why these conflicts occur and how to resolve them.

Kotlin has no support for typeclasses. We’re trying out multiple approaches to see what is possible.

Nushell has a built-in command to invoke HTTP requests: http. You don’t need an external tool like curl or httpie to make HTTP requests. There a lot of options to use with the http command. One of them is the --full or shorter -f option to return a table with extra details of the HTTP request and response. The request and response headers, the body and status are returned in the table. You can easily get information from the table with all the default selection options for a table structure.

Sometimes it happens. You stumble upon something that feels brand new to you — only to find out it’s been around for years. When I joined Moderne and started working with its OpenRewrite framework, this exact thing happened. I discovered the Java Service Provider Interface (SPI), a native mechanism in Java that enables plugin-like extensibility in applications.