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Somebody at work asked my input for good books for starting (Java) developers. As this is something that might be useful for others as well, I’ll post my list here as well. This list contains books that I found to be the most influencal to me - and are timeless. So, by design, I won’t include really specific books (the ‘how to use scrum’ of ‘spring 5.0’ type of books) and books that were really good, but I would not recommend in 2022 anymore (eg, ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, ‘Extreme Programming Explained’).

There are a lot of good Youtube videos on steaming milk with your espresso machine. For example, these videos by James Hoffmann or Lance Hedrick.

But everything I found, already started with the idea that you already have the proper milk pitcher.

It is really hard to find the answer to the question which size milk pitcher (or pitchers) you should actually buy. As I obviously needed to buy something, I can now answer that question.

When I learned Java 22 years ago, I could not know how much impact it would have on my career. At that time the language was only 3 years old (I certainly didn’t know that at that time…), but the University of Twente used it already for teaching their Object Oriented and Imperative Programming class (a lot of AWT (Swing didn’t exists yet), and Applets - that will be the future!). I still have my copy of Deitel & Deitel - Java: How to program, 2nd edition.

“Do you really want a new hobby? Because that is what espresso at home is.” - James Hoffmann. Apparently I do, as I just bought an espresso machine, and don’t really like coffee…

Twelve years ago I bought a Nespresso machine, and I’ve used that ever since. I was not really drinking that much coffee, drinking one cup every 2 weeks or so. But they stopped selling individually packaged Senseo packages, so I needed an alternative. The initial set of cups that I bought with a discount (200 pieces) lasted me about 2 years (and most of them were used by guests…). Anyway, over the years I started drinking a bit more (once a week, few times a week, almost every working day), but most of it was at work. Well, and then I suddenly was working-from-home…. So, then suddenly my Nespresso machine was used daily…

Ok, for a few years I’m irritated by the following:

See.

When you have multiple ovens in your kitchen, it is impossible to set them to the exact same time. So, once in a while (every minute ;)), there is a period where there is discrepancy. And that irritates me.

First of all you can question whether it is useful to have two clocks above each other, but that is a different story. But how hard could it be to synchronize them somehow? That shouldn’t be extremely hard, and considering that the combined cost of two mid-tier ovens is around 2000 euro, the few cents / euro to get this done shouldn’t be an issue.

After a few years, my box of sugar cubes started to become a bit empty. So, it was time to buy a new box. And this obviously means some research. It didn’t take long (hey, there are not that many options…) till I stumbled upon this claim:

The smallest sugar cubes in The Netherlands (500/160 = 3.1 grams per cube). That is certainly a claim.

Especially when on the same page, you can find this:

At Jibes I was in the fortunate situation that I was provided with a top-of-the-line laptop with full rights that I could also use privately. And at Quinity I still used a regular PC at home. So, until recently, I never had to buy a private laptop (I did bought some private laptops in the past, but those were always as an ’extra’).

So, this time, I needed to buy a primary laptop for private use.

Some time ago, we needed some new containers to store food leftovers. And we we’re at Ikea to buy - I don’t know anymore, but I’m sure it was something else :)

Anyway, we bought some Ikea 365 containers. In the shop we also saw an interesting way to hang them under a kitchen shelf. Didn’t really gave to much attention, but at home, we thought: he, that might be something for us, on the shelf where we store those containers, we don’t use all the space.

After using the same hosting provider for the weblog for 16 years, I finally switched to a new one. 16 years ago I registered the domain and got a hosting package at freerider.nl. After a few renamed and takeovers, the company is now called oxilion.nl.

In the beginning everything the things they provided was exactly what I was looking for:

• Cheap :)
• Webhosting
• PHP + MySQL support
• Email
• A few Megabytes of storage, and 1-2 Gigabytes of traffic
• FTP access

But, nowadays, my needs are a bit different:

So, that migration to Medium didn’t really worked out in the end. Never got the custom domain working, and I really didn’t like the password-less-login (every time you login, you have to request a mail…)

So, next attempt ;): migrating to Hugo, a static site generator.

For this, I enabled Wordpress again, to install a plugin, to export all content to Markdown files that can be used with Hugo. After that, it was finding a good theme, changing a few things, fixing some encoding problems. And removing all fixed url’s, so I could use (the same) permalinks.