Sometimes it’s fun to try a new challenge, and sometimes it is fun to mix a few challenges together.

This year, I switched to hosting my own installation of Paperless-ngx, and it has leveled up my paperless adulting life in several ways.

Recently I’ve been using TrueNAS Scale BlueFin at home, and exploring self-hosting a variety utilities for my personal life. As part of that I’ve run into at least one case where, despite Google Fiber, I was unable to fetch docker images for deployment in time. Here’s an easy way to fix that.

I think most Java developers (and Kotlin JVM developers by proxy) have for a long time lamented the absence of a really simple “copy directory” or “delete directory” API. It seems, at the surface, such a simple thing. Of course there are edge-cases that exist that have prevented the existence of a “one-line” API in the JDK. Kotlin 1.8 ships with some new easy-to-use APIs for just this, with tools to handle the uglier edge-cases built right in. Let’s take a look!

A couple years ago, I did a semi-deep-dive on Kotlin Inline Classes and how they were implemented. Kotlin 1.5 was just released, and with it came the evolution of inline classes into the start of value classes. Meanwhile, Kotlin 1.5 also now supports JVM Records, which at first read might sound like a very similar concept. Finally, with JEP-401 Java is going to bring “primitive classes” which also sounds like a very similar concept. This can sound all very confusing, so let’s take a look!