Every so often, I like to do some benchmarking on my own machine. Anyone who’s ever done serious performance measurement is probably already scrambling for the comment section to put me on blast as benchmarking on your desktop is basically the opposite of a controlled environment. But with a few tweaks, you can make it just good enough to trust your results.

This post is a walkthrough of how I prep my local machine for low-jitter, semi-deterministic benchmarking on Linux.

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Rust is all the rage these days and it seems that barely a day goes by without a post on Hacker News extolling the virtues of Rust: blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

After what feels like decades of reading all this hype I figured it would be a good idea to jump aboard that hype train and try my own hand at making something with Rust that would take advantage of the features Rust gives you as a developer.

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In my previous post, Contributing to iText, I talked about my use of a great Java library called iText that lets you create and read PDF files. This is a post explaining the project, Adventurer, that I was working on which uses iText.

All the way back in December 2012 I backed a Kickstarter project by Ryan North for a choose your own adventure version of Hamlet called To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure. I pledged $35 to the project with the hopes of getting a signed physical book, some rad temporary tattoos as well as a DRM-free digital copy of the book. You can read more about the book over on Wikipedia.

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Recently I’ve been working on a coding project in my spare time where I stumbled upon a bug in an open source library I was using. As I’m a software developer who works on a few open source projects already I figured I should investigate and try to fix the problem myself and contribute back.

As some people can be wary of contributing to an established open source project I figured this post detailing what I went through may encourage others to take part too.

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This is just a quick one but it’s something I forget every time and always forget where to look.

I deal with lots of Java software at work and on our development network we have our own self-signed SSL certificate which we use for self-hosted internal tools. This can cause issues when bits of Java software need to communicate with those self-signed SSL using tools. This post is here to explain my common use-case and a common pitfall I have when doing it.

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The work I do for Fivium is mostly developing a Java servlet called FOXopen which is a stateful web framework that typically runs on top of Tomcat.

Unfortunately, as with all software, it occasionally crashes and hangs (typically using 100% CPU stuck in a GC loop). When a Java application has hung because of underlying memory issues the best way to investigate the cause would be to dump all the memory, a Heap Dump.

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