Hello all. I’m back for my monthly check-in here at the ol’ blog. What’s new? I’m learning and relearning a lot of code-related things.

Coding

I just upgraded this site to Astro 3.0! The process was painless and didn’t seem to break any of its dependencies which I also upgraded. Love when upgrades go this smoothly.

I’m currently going back and refreshing my memory on a language I haven’t used in a hot minute: Java. I learned the ins and outs of coding with Java starting way back in 2005 when I was in high school. I used it regularly throughout college and my first job out of school. Then I used Java 7 for a few years while working on the Android version of the Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco app. Eventually I converted the native code portions to Kotlin. So this week has marked my first foray back into Java land in about 6 years. I love that there are some nice modern features finally making their way in, such as lambdas (albeit they are still more limited than in other languages).

Spring Boot is framework that makes building a a web service significantly easier than before. Back in the day, getting a simple REST API up and running required so much boilerplate code; Spring Boot takes care of that with simple annotations. It makes why things like Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and others became so popular. Java wasn’t designed with quick, simple web services in mind. But it’s finally catching up.

I also built a small project in Go, which marks my first foray into the world of Google’s C alternative. I thought it would be a little more dynamic when it comes to data types i.e. there aren’t as many convenience functions for things like arrays compared to say, modern JavaScript or Python. But it is very fast, which is always fun.

Writing

I kept up with my usual silliness over at The Hard Times and Hard Drive. My favorite article from September is probably this piece about famed Super Mario voice actor Charles Martinet: Mario Ambassador Charles Martinet Forced to Hide in Mario Land Embassy After Mass Koopa Troopa Riots. Nintendo announced that they bestowed the title of “Mario Ambassador” to Mr. Martinet. I found that title hilariously bizarre, as being an ambassador can be gravely serious at times.