The recording of my talk from Software Should Work is now up. :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BXu...

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Constructive Data Modeling - Alexis King | SSW 2026

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One of the clothing vendors I've bought from in the past (and which therefore will spam me forever) send me a mail whose subject is "New pants just dropped." There's not a hint of irony or punnery or snark in the actual mail, which makes me think that it was unintended and went unnoticed.

After working on ZGC for a decade, I’m happy to announce that I’m publishing a book about ZGC in JDK 25. It ships 22 May (www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...) and is being published by Taylor & Francis. You should get a copy if you want to learn more about ZGC. It’s available for pre-order now.

Funny how"AI hypemonger bro" is never on the lists of jobs that AI hypemonger bros claim are about to be AI'ed away.

Me at McDonald's: I would like a Big Mac. McDonald's: That'll be $5.75 Me: *sigh* paywalled

From tonight’s Scrabble game: Q: is Zeno a word? A: it’s halfway there.

America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.

Peeve: financial journalists that don't know what the words "plunge" or "plummet" mean. Folks, when a volatile security drops 3.5% in a day, that's a dog-bites-man story. Metapeeve: none of the news aggregators give you decent tools for "stop showing me content from whatever idiot wrote this."

Hey #Java devs! At @devoxx.com, the Java Team at #Oracle is hosting an "Ask The Architects" panel. Post your questions here by Wed 23:00 UTC! Then check out the recording to hear the experts’ answers (as many as we can). 📝 Please read the questions others have suggested to prevent double-posting.

Ah, now here come the "this time it's different" predictions. Right on schedule.

The switches and outlets in my house were a random mix of styles and colors, so this weekend I replaced them all with more modern ones. OMG these new lever-edge devices are SO much easier than the screw-terminal kind (and so much safer than the backstab kind.) Anything else should be against code.

"If you're actually an impostor, it's not a syndrome" 😂 www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK...

Vibe coding fixed my impostor syndrome

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Today, in "you had one job" failures: the FedEx "access manager" app has a place to add "help us find your address." The field accepts 20 characters. If finding my house isn't already obvious from the map, it's surely going to take more than 20 characters to explain it.

Glad to see that more shopping sites are upping their "filter" game, and some even exerting some pressure on vendor data quality. What I would love is to be able to look at an item and _see its values_ for all the filterable quantities, so I can refine my search with "(not) like this"

RIP Tom Lehrer. I discovered his music in 1974, when my teacher brought in one of his albums to illustrate different forms of political protest. She generously let me borrow it, I played it a zillion times. At that age, I didn't understand it all, but I still thought it was hilarious. And still do.

Jersey Mike's tagline is "A Sub Above." But "Sub" literally means "below." Does this bother anyone else, or is it just me?

It says a lot about the timeline we live in that the only stock that hasn't been pummeled by the sabotage being inflicted on the world economy is ... Gamestonk.

The great thing about first world problems is that there are so many to choose from!

Gah companies suck at survey design. Got a survey for a hotel I've stayed at many times. Rate your stay 1-10? OK. But then they want a "better/as/worse than expected". I know anything less than top rating is worse than not rating at all. But it _is_ exactly as expected - which is why I stay there.

This was published in Mad Magazine in the late 60s. I remember reading it when I was a kid. I didn't understand it then; I couldn't believe people could be so stupid.

NQOH: "moving the overton elevator"

OH: "DUI hire"

Please can we just get to the point where we charge more for overhead space than for checked luggage?

Stumbled upon #JEP502 which is about #StableValue, a new way of having immutable objects without using final which can have an impact on #jvm #startup. It’s these continuous minor improvements that make #Java keep up with requirements… openjdk.org/jeps/502 #OpenJDK

This book is the Grey and Reuter of the current generation. New edition coming!

Martin Kleppmann@martin.kleppmann.com · last yr.

Chapters 1–7 of the second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications are now available in early release (sorry, O'Reilly subscribers only at this point). Among other changes, you may notice that we now talk about “sharding” rather than “partitioning” www.oreilly.com/library/view...

We have been working hard on a new feature for #java called "Stable Values". Don't miss my talk at #JavaOne where I uncover what this can mean in terms of improved performance and maintainability for your Java code. Early bird discounts are still available! reg.rf.oracle.com/flow/oracle/...

Every month I get an automated mail from my cable provider with the subject line of "Your billing cycle has ended". And every month, it makes me think "And now his watch has ended..."

I ran into an obnoxious engagement hack today: a spammer used a subject line that was engineered to be a likely subject line in my e-mail history, thereby spoofing Apple Mail into threading it together with a discussion with a trusted colleague. It took me a second to realize what had happened.

Just picked up a Bambu P1S on their Black Friday sale. Don't know anything (yet) about 3d printing, but I have to say this thing is a marvel of packaging-engineering. Much care has gone into allowing them to package all the accessories inside the printer for shipping, but without risk of damage.

Home upgrade peeve: product line non-orthogonality. Say Kohler has faucets in chrome, brass, and bronze. And sure, the color you want costs more. Fine. But they don't make the matching shower head in all the colors! So you still end up with mixed colors, or have to fall back to the most common.