Adulting is hard. Bills come and go, taxes have to be prepared, escrows have shortages, kids have activites, FSAs need proof of medical expenses, cars need to be registered.

The list of things an adult has to do seems to only grow larger over time, and one of the fundamental things that all adults seem to have to do is to track and file paperwork. I’ve gone “paperless” in my personal life (which I seem to have interpreted it to mean: “keep digital copies of everything, even if it was paper originally”).

When it comes to adulting, barriers to doing the right thing (like actually getting stuff filed paperlessly) are bad, as you won’t do them. So, recently I decided to make that just a little bit easier on myself with a new tool. Let me walk through the research I’ve done, what my process for paperless filing is, and where I’ve historically had problems, and how this new tool has helped me out.

Something that has always been a bit of a limitation in the Java numeric type system is the lack of support for unsigned integers. It is not particularly common to have to work with unsigned types, but when it does happen, it’s usually unpleasant in some way. Libraries like Guava have provided utilities to make it cleaner, and recent updates to Java 8 also included some unsigned helper methods.

Kotlin 1.3 has an experimental feature to make unsigned types a full citizen of the type system, while still having all of the performance of primitive integer types. Let’s take a look!

With Kotlin 1.3, a new experimental feature called “Inline Classes” is now available. This post is a somewhat deep dive into the nature of the implementation, how it works, where the edges are, and what limitations currently exist. Let’s take a look!

TypeScript 3.0 introduced the unknown type, which is described as being: “Like any, but type-safe”. This is an exploration of what that means in the Javascript and TypeScript ecosystems. and how that can be compared to strongly-typed languages like Java.

Kotlin 1.3 is bringing a new experimental feature to the compiler to help with improving program correctness via the type-system: contracts.

Contracts are a tool that allow library code (both standard library and your libraries) hint to the compiler about the constraints that are ensured on types based on the use of functions in your program. Let’s see how this can be used in practice.