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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…