Coffee, Code, and Chronicles

My wife and I are partner home brewers. While we are not distributed, we do a lot of bottle shares and we take our branding a little further than most home brewers. We have a home brewery on untappd, think "Facebook for Beer," We have labels printed for our bottles, stickers for laptops, and even custom bottle caps. Artistically inclined, we think we do a pretty good job. There's a nerd streak that runs through our brewery name,  Thirsty Stone Brewing . Both a pun and a homage to ourselves and our daughter. Then there is the logo modeled after Gallifreyan, the fictional language and writing system of the Time Lords, Doctor Who's birth race. Our beers always are a pun. All great and all usually the work of my wife.  Then there are "my beers": beers I make that my wife might not care for or drink a lot of, but I mostly share with my friends. There were the annual years of Night Gaunt (2015) — 2016 , 2017 , 2017 3.5e , 2019 — and Pale and Gaunt (2018) , an impe...

My first blogging A-to-Z was in 2011... under my old blog, Another Caffeinated Day. Alas, ACD had to be archived. My primary themes in all those years were Warhammer and Table Top RPGs (TTRPG). Coffee, Code, and Chronicles will be no different. Nerdery. Fiction. &c. C9Chronicles may not tack to closely to the theme of 2025, Gratitude and Community. Make no mistake, my history with A-to-Z is long and my gratitude to the A to Z and TTRPG  communities  runs deep. Vielen Dank! I'm looking forward to returning to A-to-Z 2025. My theme will lead with TTRPGs again. The topics? As always, wait for it... wait for it... Many are easy, but watch for those real stretches in X, Y and Z.

 Niklos Kaunitz Tales and the Game Mechanics The Tail and The Bridge is a narrative crafted from the events of a recent game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, fourth edition (WFRP4e). Niklos Kaunitz is my player-character, PC for short. The in-game narrative around Niklos is much more than just this first tale. We've been playing for more than a year. WFRP is built around a fantasy, pseudo-Germanic, 15th-16th century world populated by Elves, Dwarves, Men, Halflings, Magic, Gods, and a menagerie  beasts and humanoids. The game is almost as old as Dungeons and Dragons, but its world is largely a singular narrative cf.  D&D's multiverse. The game is billed as A Grim World of Perilous Adventure . It's not low fantasy nor is it high fantasy. It is "mud and blood" to borrow a phrase from my favorite WFRP "actual play" podcast of the same name . WFRP's character mechanics are built on "careers." It is the stand out difference from many other Rol...

A Niklos Kaunitz Tale Intrigue was something Niklos was use to. Gangs practiced it. Bosses practiced it. The streets of Marienburg were full of it being practiced. But the intrigue of “The Institute" was something else altogether. This was Guild and Noble intrigue. The kind of Intrigue Niklos was use to was much simpler with often more brutal ends. Already the members of this Institute had left him charged with a lead lined box of wyrdstone for a couple of weeks. Two weeks longer than he wanted the charge once the contents were no longer speculation. On his part or his “friends" part.  Niklos's “friends." In the last month, what was simply four citizens of the Empire thrown into a common lot has become service to intrigue in service of more power, with or without wyrdstone or sorcery or the touch of gods, good or ruinous. Niklos's shoulder and elbow were finally healed after a lightning strike, clearly of sorcerous origin, at “the arcane  Turm ." The Institu...

Some years ago I was doing some work to design a full text search capability for my employer. In my research, I stumbled on reflectoring.io . The site promotes itself as "Where the HOW meets the WHY" and I immediately found value in a couple of articles, then only a year or so old: Full-Text Search with Hibernate and Spring Boot and Using Elasticsearch with Spring Boot .  Reflectoring introduced me to Stratospheric ,  the work of several of the Reflectoring's authors, Björn Wilmsmann, Philip Riecks, and Tom Hombergs. I picked it up recently.  Why is a career Solutions Architect and Java apologist with 20+ years of experience picking up a book about Spring Boot and AWS? Because learning is a life long goal and learning from doers is as important as learning from thinkers. I tend to take apart books like this, not in a critical sense, but in an "applied theory" sense. Stratospheric approaches the project is a specific way, using tools I'm not comfortable wit...

First, let's clear up the URL. c9chronicles. c-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-chronicles. c-o-f-f-e-e-c-o-d-e-chronicles.  Coffee Code Chronicles This common—and esoteric in the sense that you see it a lot in the computer engineering space and almost nowhere else—way of shorting long words, and saving keystrokes may be unfamiliar to you, the reader. In computer engineering, common ones one may encounter include the following:  a11y ("accessibility", "a-eleven-y" and not to be confused with "ally") i18n ("internationalization", "i-eighteen-n") l10n ("localization", "i-ten-n") I even use the notation for my GitLab OSS project, another15y ; a short play on Another Caffeinated Day. Another Caffeinated Day was my blog of some 18 years that was a showcase of all sorts of nerd topics, and Coffee, Code, and Chronicles aims to align to that venerable blog. The blog is not dead, just not online. Backed up, all the data and posts, an...