Archives April 2022

Update #7 Am I doing the right thing?

by arjan Courses, Java, Personal

The other day I was talking about my Java challenge with one of the (sr) Java developers in my team. I told him that I was currently learning topics like Java Generics and Access Modifiers. His reaction caused me some concern.

He explained that these indeed are topics that Java developers learn and know, but in practice you do not really “use” them. In the daily work you mostly implement known design patterns, which you bootstrap with more or less stand Java coding blocks. And most of the time standard libraries like Spring(-Boot) also take away complexity from using Java standard functionality.

So, should I stop learning the details of Java and more focus on general Java, design patterns and Spring?

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Update #6 Old fashioned bash scripting

by arjan Programming

Due to holidays (a week in the sun & the snow!) and busy return at work, my study progress has been disappointing. But I was able to work on another technical topic that had some urgency: updating the software on my NUC that runs this blog. For the technical nurds some more information on my setup:

  1. An intel NUC with 16G memory and a fast 500GB SSD
  2. The NUC runs Proxmox virtualization software
  3. In Proxmox I have a so called LXC container running, which you could compare with a virtual machine
  4. The LXC container runs Nginx as reverse proxy for my domains and docker to run my containers
  5. On the LXC container, 4 docker containers are running:
  • 1 WordPress container for this blog
  • 1 WordPress container for my band: https://thomandthejerrys.nl
  • 1 MySQL container for WordPress
  • 1 Portainer container, to have a nice frontend for the containers

Portainer is great: you visually see the status of your containers and you can stop, start or rebuild them from the GUI. You can even go directly into a container terminal from Portainer. But there is one problem, you cannot update portainer from within portainer. It is not too difficult to do this from the command line, but I always forget the exact commands. The solution: A bash script that took me almost a day to make.

Continue if you are curious…

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