A Java geek

Remote Development made simple with DevPod

I come relatively late to the subject of Remote Development Environments (also known as Cloud Development Environments). The main reason is that I haven’t worked in a development team for over six years. However, I’m now working for Loft Labs, and we have a RDE product: DevPod. I wanted to understand our value proposition as I’ll be at FOSDEM operating the DevPod booth.

Development

On inheritance and subtyping

Java is the first language I learned in my career. Its structure is foundational in my early years of understanding programming concepts. After going through several other languages with very different approaches, I’ve widened my point of view. Today, I want to reflect on the idea of inheritance. Inheritance in Java In Java, the idea of inheritance is tightly coupled with the concept of subtyping. Subtyping is the implementation of a IS A relationship.

Technical

My first steps with Playwright

In my previous company, I developed a batch job that tracked metrics across social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, etc. Then I realized I could duplicate it for my own 'persona'. The problem is that some media don’t provide an HTTP API for the metrics I want. Here are the metrics I want on LinkedIn: I searched for a long time but found no API access for the metrics above.

Technical

The Home Assistant companion app

Besides a regular webapp and a Mac app, which uses the same endpoints as the webapp, Home Assistant also provides mobile apps. In this post, I want to describe its advantages over the former. I’ll use iOS to do this: Samsung’s French partner to recycle used mobiles tricked me once, and I moved away from Samsung. I decided to buy Apple for better integration since I’ve had Mac computers for the last few years.

Miscellaneous

2024 in retrospective

For the first post of 2025, I’m continuing my retrospective series. As last year, before diving in into the report proper, I’d like to remind you that Ukraine is still fighting for its survival after nearly 3 years and countless Russian war crimes. The civilized world can’t allow rewarding the invasion of a sovereign country, lest we see more invasions.

Technical

An example of HACS: Adaptive Lighting

In the previous post of this focus, we replaced Philips Hue automation with the one from Home Assistant. One significant gap we noticed was that Home Assistant doesn’t automatically adjust the brightness according to the time of the day, a feature Philips Hue offers. In this post, we are going to address this gap. The first step when wanting to add a feature to Home Assistant is to browse through available integrations.

Technical

A solution to the problem of cluster-wide CRDs

I’m an average Reddit user, scrolling much more than reading or interacting. Sometimes, however, a post rings a giant red bell. When I stumbled upon If you could add one feature to K8s, what would it be?, I knew the content would be worth it. The most voted answer is: Namespace scoped CRDs A short intro to CRDs Kubernetes comes packed with existing objects, such as Pod, Service, DaemonSet, etc., but you can create your own: the latter are called Custom Resource Definitions.

Technical

Replace Philips Hue automation with Home Assistant's

This is the 3rd post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I’m the happy owner of a couple of Philips Hue connected lights for a some years. Some of them are colored, some of them regular. In addition, I bought a sensor to go along with the light I installed in my toilets: it turns on automatically when its detects a movement there. In this post, I want to document how I replaced the proprietary automation with Home Assistant’s.

Technical

The Home Assistant model

Home Assistant is a massive beast. It can be overwhelming for a newcomer; it was for me. In this post, I want to describe the underlying model of Home Assistant, which is a good entry point for your home automation journey.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog