In my previous blog post I wrote about how Google Guava’s ListenableFuture is an improvement over Java 6’s Future class. But Java 8 ships with a CompletableFuture class that brings much of the same benefits into the standard Java API. The…

Google Guava’s concurrency classes provide some advantages over using Java’s default classes. Guava’s Futures offer the following benefits:

1. You can add “listeners” to the result of a Future’s…

I found out about the just concluded NIPS 2017 conference through a mention on my Twitter timeline. I’d heard this was a premier venue for presenting research in artificial intelligence, so I clicked through to the #NIPS2017 hashtag. The…

In an article titled The Feel of Java (PDF), James Gosling, one of the language’s creators, explains the design choices which went into the making of that language. He states frankly that Java was not meant to be innovative, but instead tried to synthesize a few carefully chosen long…

Java Annotations — a conceptual overview

I’ve been a casual user of annotations in code for many years but had never bothered to…

My friend Asad messaged me from the ongoing KubeCon 2017 that a keynote slide from Brendan Burns (one of the creators of Kubernetes) advocated that configuring your app for the cloud native world ought to become significantly simpler. That appealed to me…