Coffee, Code, and Chronicles

The Escapist, in 2018, created Read an RPG Book in Public week . The event details follow: Read An RPG Book in Public Week is an event that happens three times a year, during the weeks surrounding March 4, July 27, and October 1 (starting on the Sunday on or before, and ending on the Saturday on or after). During these weeks, roleplaying enthusiasts are encouraged to take their favorite RPG rulebooks out with them and read them in public - on the bus, in the coffee shop, at lunch, at the park, or anywhere (as long as it isn't disruptive to work, school, church, or any other functions). I try to honor this event every year, so I thought: I know ICS, I can tell a machine to create an ICS calendar file for sharing. I asked Claude, specifically. It adds the calendar for the next 20 years, or 2046. Felt about right. God willing, I'll still be playing or running Warhammer with or for my grandchildren. Why these three weeks? March 4 was designated as GM's Day in 2008, and was coi...

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...