Recent Posts

Compiling Scala Native in a Github Action; Alternatives to GraalVM

10 minute read

Scala Native is a compiler and JDK written in Scala with the goal of removing Scala’s dependency on the JVM. This isn’t meant to achieve a higher performance such as with JDKs, and it is targeting a specialized use-case not considered to be today’s typical Scala development. Its competitors are Rust and Go, not GraalVM, Java or Kotlin. This article goes through common steps and challenges encountered when compiling Scala Native for linux with a GitHub Action.

Data Transfers within a Github Action

2 minute read

The free tier of GitHub Packages has limited bandwidth to download private artifacts; which can make it unsuitable for use in a CI/CD pipeline for projects on a budget. In an effort to increase Github Packages’ usability, this article develops an alternative approach minimizing the dependency on GitHub Packages as hot storage, but preserving it as a viable cold storage, durable storage solution.

List Lookup Cache with Scala ZIO

5 minute read

In-memory caches mapping Key => Value are a simple and versitile tool to reduce number of calls to an origin datasource. There are many use-cases requiring multiple cache calls, prefering Seq[Key] => Seq[Value]. Can a standard cache implementation be expanded to efficiently handle this scenario?

The Many Different Forms of Concurrency and Parallelism

10 minute read

Modern software design requires the understanding of the different layers of concurrency and parallelism that can exist. Abstractions exposed by libraries and frameworks can inadvertently hide layers of parallelism when their focus is the simplification of others; and libraries trying to treat all levels of parallelism equality can be limited to low level concepts for their common interface. In order to optimally design and avoid errors, all levels of concurrency and parallelism need to be understood no matter what framework is chosen.

SBT Parallel Compile Optimizations using Quill Sub-Projects

9 minute read

Scala is slow to compile. Advanced syntax constructs and a robust type system can increase developer productivity and runtime reliability but also create extra work for the compiler. Macro libraries such as Quill are effectivily programs written for the compiler, and can represent an unbounded amount of work depending on what they are trying to accomplish. Are there ways to structure our Scala 3 code to ensure that we can embrace the rich macro ecosystem without excessively long compile times?

ZIO Migration from Akka and Scala Futures

6 minute read

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Akka / Apache Pekko is a robust and popular Scala framework used to build concurrent production-grade software. One of the concurrency primatives it uses is the standard scala.concurrent.Future class. Before these existed in Scala, there was the Twitter Future offering similiar, but expanded functionality including cancellation / interruptibility. Ignoring the functional coding style promoted by ZIO for a second, the concurrency primative used by ZIO, known as ZIO[R, E, A] can be viewed as a more advanced Future[A].

Akka gRPC with Let’s Encrypt

3 minute read

The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) has recommendations about encrypting the web; there is no reason to be running servers over unencrypted HTTP any longer. It is irresponsible to your users and unnecessary, as such there is a a formal mechanism called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) that enforces HTTPS for all requests at the domain level. Taking it further, modern browsers include a set of domains which can only work over HTTPS, it started with Google TLDs such as .dev and .app, but it is growing https://hstspreload.org/.

Trade Audit Mobile App Infrastructure

3 minute read

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The release of the Trade Audit mobile app is almost here. It is currently in MVP stage, but its infrastructure is a pretty typical cloud based deployment. This article discusses design choices made, evaluating how effective they were.

Lit Custom Components for SVG Generation

4 minute read

SVG markup is very similar to HTML, and the Lit Web Components library can be used to not only generate HTML custom components, but also manipulate SVG in a similar way using Lit templates. Lit is a small 5kb library that removes the boilerplate code of DOM generation, and is highly interoperable with all web frameworks since it relies on browser native custom elements.

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) Domains on GitHub Pages

4 minute read

GitHub Pages is free hosting for static content webpages, and a cost effective way to publish micro-sites for all of your projects. Can it handle custom domains, and HSTS domains? How about multiple custom HSTS domains?

JVM versus Python for AWS Lambda Functions

3 minute read

The suitability of programming languages across different domains is a contested topic. AWS Lambda Functions are a serverless solution that can be used for a wide range of problems from tiny to large tasks. For lightweight tasks how does the JVM stack up?

Scala 3 and AWS Lambda Functions

5 minute read

AWS Lambda offer the ability to run code functions without a server. Basically standalone functions that receive JSON as a parameter and have up to 15 minutes to do anything. The source of the JSON event can be anything, AWS has configured most of their AWS products to emit events; for example uploading a file to S3 creates JSON that contains information about the file. Lambdas are meant to be simple and short-lived code snippets, so each Lambda can only listen to 1 source for events (although you can proxy multiple types of events through a single source). The most generic source for events is to listen to HTTP requests on a public URL, and we’ll cover how that can be done in this article.