The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

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Mumbly_Bum excellent comments on “AI is working great for my team, and y’all are making me feel crazy”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/24

Planning and feedback loops in extreme programming

Planning and feedback loops in extreme programming

TL;DR:

Using LLM in the software development process is shifting the feedback cycle to the top of the development cycle in the graph on the right. This is a costly endeavour.

LLM deliver output that is statistically likely, decreasing the chance to incorporate outliers as they are statistically unlikely but form the burden of software development.

[Wayback/Archive] Mumbly_Bum comments on AI is working great for my team, and y’all are making me feel crazy

Most of our tickets are now (initially) generated using Claude + the Atlassian MCP, and that’s allowed us to capture missed requirements up-front.

I think this is the key disconnect (even taking into account the notes from meetings) in understanding our jobs and why we’re not going away and why LLMs create harm in delivery.

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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, LLM, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on Delphi Debugger Visualizers

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/16

Ever since Chris Hesik spoke on “RAD Studio 2010 what’s new in the IDE debugger”, wanted to write a blog post about it.

Still haven’t found time to do that in depth, but it’s important to at least jot a few notes, so let’s start with the 20111020 conference session notes.

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development, Software Heritage | Leave a Comment »

Two online transcription tools

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/12

From best to second best:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Good Tape (which at the time of writing in 2023 was free, but likely now is still affordable)
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Azure Video Indexer Portal – Cognitive Video Indexing (at the time of writing the first 10 hours are free, then it’s around EUR 1/minute)

Related blog post: GitHub – ggerganov/whisper.cpp: Port of OpenAI’s Whisper model in C/C++

Via:

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Posted in Blogging, Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, LifeHacker, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

KotlinConf’23 video streams (including the keynote by Kevlin Henney which is generic to any programming language or concept)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/26

Some of the video URLs of #kotlinconf23 most via [Wayback/Archive] KotlinConf’23 – YouTube:

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Posted in ChatGPT, Code Quality, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Java Platform, Kotlin, Pingback, Software Development, Stackoverflow, Technical Debt, Testing | Leave a Comment »

Some tools for conference organisers

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/21

Just in case I ever get involved in organising a conference:

Via:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Angrynerds Podcast – YouTube: hackerhotel review
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Hackerhotel 2020 – Review – YouTube (starts at around the 07:30 mark)
  3. [Wayback/Archive] 2020-03-28-Content-meeting-minutes – MCH2022 wiki
  4. [Wayback/Archive] OrangeCon on X: “@J0R1AN who is giving a workshop on hack the box methodology at Orangecon found a stored XSS on pretalx. (Which would probably be able to make CFP reviewers automatically accept his submission.) It is now fixed. Thanks for the quick response and fix @pretalx” / X

Queries:

–jeroen

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Posted in Conferences, Event, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

You thought Windows drivers from 2006 were old, wait’ll you see the Intel drivers from 1968! – The Old New Thing

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/19

ImageInteresting strategy that driver vendors use to prevent their drivers to be installed when newer versions are installed [Wayback/Archive] You thought Windows drivers from 2006 were old, wait’ll you see the Intel drivers from 1968! – The Old New Thing

Or in other words: with this mechanism drivers can be a generic alternative to be installed when no more specific or newer driver is available.

Via [Wayback/Archive] ⚜ 8-bit Hero (aka Sven) ⚜ on Twitter: “Wow, Intel has been writing windows divers for a long time! Had no idea.”

Related

Intel Drivers dated 1970 shown by [Wayback/Archive] Kevlin Henney (@KevlinHenney) in his Keynote streamed at around the 1200 second mark: [Wayback/Archive] KotlinConf’23 – Effectenbeurszaal Day 2 – YouTube.

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Java Platform, Kotlin, Power User, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Know your TypeScript/JavaScript operators… or why having little ceremony sometimes makes programmers life harder

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/12

const a = undefined; const result1 = a ?? 0 + 10; const b = 100; const result2 = b ?? 0 + 10;Take this cool example I extended from [Wayback/Archive] Thomas 🅰️🇨🇵 on Twitter: “#Typescript quizz What will be the value of result1 and result2 ?” which lacked alt-badge, so I [Wayback/Archive] responded with the image on the right that has alt-text.

Based on that, I added a bit of logging:

const a = undefined;
const result1 = a ?? 0 + 10;

const b = 100;
const result2 = b ?? 0 + 10;

console.log(result1);
console.log(result2);

Two questions:

  1. What is the output of both log lines?

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Posted in .NET, C#, Conference Topics, Conferences, Continuous Integration, Delphi, Development, Event, Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Maven, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript | Leave a Comment »

Remember: languages automatically evaluate const expressions

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/16

The first tweet below reminded me that few people seem to realise that const expressions are evaluated by the compiler/interpreter into the actual const value. Often this is called constant folding (though that can happen outside constant definitions too!)

Truckloads of source code I have come across in all kinds of languages where people put the calculated values in the expression like described here:

[Wayback/Archive] Kevlin Henney on Twitter: “For example: const int secondsInDay = 24 * 60 * 60; There is no need to calculate it yourself: const int secondsInDay = 86400; Or, related to what I’ve just seen: const int secondsInDay = 86400; // 24 * 60 * 60“.

In languages that support rich enough types, you can even pass a typed constant like timespan, duration or period around:

[Wayback/Archive] David Kerr on Twitter: “@KevlinHenney The general point is well made of choir course. In java, etc you can pass a Duration object around, no need to interpret an in. Type safety, self documenting.”

My recommendation is to use an expression like the first and maybe document the calculated value (for instance for ease of bug hunting) like here

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Online tools to test JSONPath Queries (plus a small list of Amazon top level domains)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/15

I wanted to parse some JSON being sent back during an XMLHttpRequest (what a wrongly named call is that!) of which I grabbed the content using the web development tools of my Chromium based browser.

Input

I got this list of amazon top level domain names from research I did for my blog post Download your Kindle books soon, because Amazon will block them after February 25, 2025 . The source is [Wayback/Archive] Amazon operating domains by country. · GitHub [Wayback/Archive] in the file amazon-domains.json:

{
    "us": "https://www.amazon.com",
    "uk": "https://www.amazon.co.uk",
    "ca": "https://www.amazon.ca",
    "de": "https://www.amazon.de",
    "es": "https://www.amazon.es",
    "fr": "https://www.amazon.fr",
    "it": "https://www.amazon.it",
    "jp": "https://www.amazon.co.jp",
    "in": "https://www.amazon.in",
    "cn": "https://www.amazon.cn",
    "sg": "https://www.amazon.com.sg",
    "mx": "https://www.amazon.com.mx",
    "ae": "https://www.amazon.ae",
    "br": "https://www.amazon.com.br",
    "nl": "https://www.amazon.nl",
    "au": "https://www.amazon.com.au",
    "tr": "https://www.amazon.com.tr",
    "sa": "https://www.amazon.sa",
    "se": "https://www.amazon.se",
    "pl": "https://www.amazon.pl"
}

The list is far from complete, so tomorrow I will post some more sources in Some pages that have lists of Amazon toplevel domains.

The queries and results show you that the original JSONPath (2007) and its RFC 9535 definition (2024, just 2 years ago) do not support getting the key names of the above list the ~ part in the first query below fails, and only the second query works.

This means that finding the right tooling is important.

Example

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, JSONPath, PHP, Python, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript, Web Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/10

I mention dead links a lot, and always try to archive content before scheduling it in a blog post.

No different for [Wayback/Archive] Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral, which provides background information about how the short lifespan of most URLs.

Their 2024 publication was a poster in PNG and PTTX format (linked below under the abstract), so I created this PDF out of it:

Abstract

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User, Web Browsers, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

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