Vaadin is a great frontend application that has the amazing advantage of allowing you to do all your work in plain Java. Similar to other UI frameworks like ReactJS or Flutter, it has a nice collection of preset widgets and client-side scripts, but at the same time allows you to…

If you have ever taught, or at least applied for a teaching job, you may have heard of Bloom’s taxonomy. The main principle of the taxonomy is that, a lesson plan might consider what we expect students to learn coming out of the tutorial, workshop, course or program of study…

Halloween has long been my favorite season in Canada and the U.S. to the point that each time I hear complaints about Halloween treats coming out too early, I begin to mute the naysayers. Halloween is objectively the best season, and I intend to make my argument from the values…

With a last name like Deschamps, and a history of being in and out of speaking French, I have pretty good experience with what does or does not help in absorbing the syntax, rules and texture of the French language. The obvious answer to this question is to absorb yourself…

People learning Spring for the first time will find that certain tutorials will only get them so far. Spring Security is one of those tutorials. For example, most tutorials will show how to set up a basic security configuration with a deeply problematic `InMemoryUserDetailsService` with hard-coded usernames, passwords and…

Science data is available at your fingertips. Here’s a way to ingest it into your Akka/Scala projects. — ERDDAP is a tool produced by the NOAA to provide scientific data sets in extensible formats for broad public use. If you have ever worked with scientific data before, you know that it is enormously challenging to work with because the data formats are built for very specific scientific uses…

It’s got to be an 7/10 for me to want it in my life, from now on. One positive side-effect of social distancing for me has been some modest weight loss based on a few principles. For one, as the “chef” in the family, I have decided we should move…

When I was a librarian, people thought I sat in a room all day with dusty books. Meanwhile neither I nor my colleagues could remember the last time they read a book for pleasure. Now that I have a PhD, people think it’s the same, only possibly worse because tenure…

Everything is just… sales. Everything is just… marketing. Everything can be resolved by… empathy. Hustle. Emotional intelligence. Branding. Discipline. Attention to detail. Leadership. Community. Productivity. Quality. Design thinking. Rigor. Learning from failure. Continuous learning. Planning. Team building. It seems like “everything” can be distilled down to quite a few things…