2023 Free / Open Source Software Accomplishments

I find it hard to believe, but it is true: another year has wrapped up. With the conclusion of 2023, I’m looking back at some of my free and open-source software accomplishments over those 12 months. My contributions are, once again, all over the place: different languages, industries, technology stacks, and architectural layers. I made … Continue reading 2023 Free / Open Source Software Accomplishments

Contributing Improved Security to JavaMelody with Content Security Policy

JavaMelody is a web based monitoring tool frequently run in production environments, providing insights including CPU usage, hot spots in code, database connection pool utilization, and more. I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve security, so when a security scan pointed out that the JavaMelody web interface didn’t have a Content Security Policy … Continue reading Contributing Improved Security to JavaMelody with Content Security Policy

Contributing to GitLab and Lighthouse CI

While running Lighthouse CI on GitLab CI, I came across a problem: Lighthouse CI wants information about the current git commit, but it couldn’t get all of that information. In that case, Lighthouse CI falls back to running the git command; however, in my docker images, I don’t have git installed nor did I want to do so. So, I set out to fix this shortcoming in both Lighthouse and GitLab by adding the necessary environment variable to GitLab CI and having Lighthouse use it. The result is that I submitted a PR to Lighthouse that was merged and included in Lighthouse CI 0.7.1 and an MR to GitLab that was merged and included in GitLab 13.11. Now users (including my future self) will have a smooth, Just Works™ experience with these two tools.

Lighthouse Performance Testing

Lighthouse is a great way to establish a build-measure-learn feedback loop resulting in continuous value creation by testing ideas in the areas of SEO, performance, accessibility, and more. In this article, I’ll cover what Lighthouse is and how to add it a project with examples covering pure Javascript (node) projects and Gradle projects (with any … Continue reading Lighthouse Performance Testing

Change the Spring Session JDBC Serialization Method to Improve Performance

Spring Session JDBC is a great way to allow an application to be stateless. By storing the session in the database, a request can be routed to any application server. This approach provides significant advantages such as automatic horizontal scaling, seamless failover, and no need for session affinity. By using JDBC, the database the application … Continue reading Change the Spring Session JDBC Serialization Method to Improve Performance

Performance Testing WebDAV Clients

Part of migrating applications from on-premises hosting to cloud hosting (AWS, Azure, etc) involves re-evaluating how users access their data. A recent migration involved users running Windows 10 accessing a Windows file share using the SMB protocol. Since SMB isn’t safe to run directly over the Internet (it’s usually not encrypted and it has a … Continue reading Performance Testing WebDAV Clients

Spring Cache Abstraction as a Hibernate Cache Provider

Many of the projects I’ve worked on over my career have leveraged a Spring/Hibernate stack. Over that time, the Spring/Hibernate integration has greatly improved making the once tedious and repetitive chore of setting up a new project (and maintaining an existing one through upgrades, expansion, and refactoring) far simpler. Now it’s as simple as going … Continue reading Spring Cache Abstraction as a Hibernate Cache Provider

Issues using Ehcache with ARC as the Hibernate Cache

When using Ehcache’s ARC (Automatic Resource Control) on a cache acting as the Hibernate cache, these kinds of warning will likely appear: WARN [pool-1-thread-1] [ehcache.pool.impl.DefaultSizeOfEngine] sizeOf The configured limit of 100 object references was reached while attempting to calculate the size of the object graph. This can be avoided by adding stop points with @IgnoreSizeOf … Continue reading Issues using Ehcache with ARC as the Hibernate Cache

Issues using Ehcache with ARC as the Thymeleaf Cache

Ehcache’s ARC (Automatic Resource Control) is pretty great – it more or less automatically and optimally handles cache sizing/allocation. Using ARC, one can effectively say, “Here’s 2GB to allocate for caching – no more than that – manage the cache as best as possible.” Of course, more complex rules can also be done (on a … Continue reading Issues using Ehcache with ARC as the Thymeleaf Cache