Some of the video URLs of #kotlinconf23 most via [Wayback/Archive] KotlinConf’23 – YouTube:
Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category
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
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:
- [Wayback/Archive] frab | conference management system
- [Wayback/Archive] cbeyls/fosdem-companion-android: FOSDEM Companion for Android
- [Wayback/Archive] rkallensee/fosdem-android: This is a native Android app which helps you to manage the FOSDEM conference schedule on your phone. Note: this is a fork of the app of orrc (https://github.com/orrc/fosdem-android) which is in turn a fork of the “official” app hosted on Sourceforge (https://github.com/orrc/fosdem-android).
- [Wayback/Archive] pretalx — CfP and scheduling for conferences
Via:
- [Wayback/Archive] Angrynerds Podcast – YouTube: hackerhotel review
- [Wayback/Archive] Hackerhotel 2020 – Review – YouTube (starts at around the 07:30 mark)
- [Wayback/Archive] 2020-03-28-Content-meeting-minutes – MCH2022 wiki
- [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:
- [Wayback/Archive] fosdem companion – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] pretalx – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] “frab” conference – Google Search
–jeroen
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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
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
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:
- 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 aDurationobject 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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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: 2852 | 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 »
Steven Murdoch on Twitter: “However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content! 3/9”
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/07
Windows had its own aCropalypse in the Snipping tool, but other UWP based applications are vulnerable of that too because of this:
[Wayback/Archive] Steven Murdoch on Twitter: “However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content! 3/9”
It is part of this interesting [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @sjmurdoch on Thread Reader App with these two parts just after the above Tweet:
The old Win32 API for saving a file was (roughly) to show a file picker, get the filename the user selected, and then open the file. To open a file, the programmer must specify whether to overwrite the file or not, and example code usually does overwrite the file.
However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content!
The tread continued supporting this statement, that in the new situation you need to manually truncated the file, and referenced these links:
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Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, UWP (Universal Windows Platform), Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Excel: operations involving the last occurence of a substring (with examples getting the current Worksheet, Workbook and file/directory path)
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/02
Last month I wrote about CELL function looks interesting but beware: language nightmares coming up….
There I mentioned both formulas from [Wayback/Archive] Get sheet name only – Excel formula | Exceljet and [Wayback/Archive] Insert the current Excel file name, path, or worksheet in a cell – Microsoft Support failing to deliver the expected results
an official Microsoft example of obtaining the Worksheet name which I suspected would not work on systems allowing ] in path names. And indeed it is true: that case fails on both MacOS and Windows in the same way.
Here you see the failures of both the ExcelJet function and the ones from Microsoft Support on two operating systems:
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Why octal is important (via @jpluimers on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”)
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/03
A few years back I tweeted [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”
It was a kind of tongue-in-cheek reaction (with a way better picture below) to a very valuable post by b0rk (Julia Evans) on both Twitter and Mastodon [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “bases” / [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “bases title: bases # we usually…” – Mastodon for two reasons:
- There are various interpretations of bases
- Octal is very important to educate as errors introduced by its support are hard to spot even if you do know about octal.
Back to Julia’s post:
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 