Alexandru Nedelcu - Blog

In the past month alone I’ve heard these phrases: I haven’t written code since 2025; Code reviews are dead; People no longer read code.

The Unix shell is great for supporting executable scripts via the shebang header, but I’ve always found scripting languages limiting, due to the inability to specify dependencies (other than the standard library).

Thomas, my cat, thinking about freeing himself from the shackles of GC.

Thomas, my tomcat, trying to fit into a box of tissues, visibly distressed that he can't fit.

Thomas, self-employed tomcat, worried about the evolution of the software industry.

At work, we have been using Akka/Pekko HTTP for some servers, but one of the foundations is Cats-Effect, and I wanted to use Tapir for refactoring one of our microservices.

Alternative to Scala’s Promise and Cats-Effect’s Deferred, exposing a hybrid API, useful for interoperability between imperative libraries (e.g., Akka/Pekko) and Cats-Effect.

Me and my wife on our winter retreat, somewhere in Brașov, Romania.

The TLDR: Eat your own dogfood by practicing DevOps on your own infrastructure, change mentality to one oriented towards automation, and grow your hard engineering skills, such as learning to do programming, because it’s in the job description.

In the age of “AI” Agents generating the code, is your programming language choice still relevant?

Java has a usable interruption protocol, and that’s good.

Scala logo on the left, F# logo on the right.

How to parse HOCON in Scala 3?

Talking with my dogs brings me greater pleasure, and I think it helps me get more work done.

Scala 3 came with significant indentation (🏛️).

Scala has a neat feature called match types.

Or how I'm using GitHub's Copilot in Agent mode for yak shaving, evolving my Jekyll-powered website for rendering mathematical formulas by SVG images, instead of heavy JavaScript.

My son started high-school, so I’m helping him with mathematics.

Simplifying radicals is strangely satisfying.

My cat, Thomas, sitting in a box, telling me that maybe it's better if I went to touch some grass.

Video link (open on YouTube.com) I've delivered (sometime this year) this presentation at a local meetup (ING Hubs Romania).

The staircase at EPFL that inspired Scala's logo.

I currently have around ~370 GB stored in OneDrive, including the family’s photo archive that I’d rather not lose.

What’s the difference between Option[A] and A | Null?

In my previous post, I mentioned that I now use Firefox as my main browser and you should too.

I grew up with the Internet, since before people had Internet connections at home or in their pocket.

I like having a database of links I encounter on the web, like a searchable database, complete with archive links as well.

I'm self-hosting stuff using Docker on my own server.

"Discussing The Divine Comedy With Dante", a painting by Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi and Zhang An Now that you've seen the dangers of social media, the question is, what are you going to do about it?

This sample shows an HTTP server and an HTTP client, that can cleanly cancel requests, both on the client-side and on the server-side.

My cat, Thomas, trying to understand "source available" licenses “Shrink-wrapped”, “off-the-shelf” apps, or what the young have come to know as premium apps from the app store, are destined to languish, to become expensive subscriptions, or to be sold to…

Optimising costs and my workflow is a personal obsession of mine.

When generating random numbers for certain use-cases, such as when generating keys / IDs, it’s recommended for the random function to be “cryptographically strong”.

Ads on 𝕏 (formerly Twitter) can be blocked.

The Scala logo, in the shape of a hexagon, meant to fit the logos of certain well known libraries, as a hint 😜 As software developers, we invest a lot in our tools.

Today I was reminded how awesome Scala is for scripting, via Scala CLI.

A new year is upon us, and it's customary to make resolutions.

This is an update to my december adventure, in which I took it upon myself to learn the Rust programming langauge.

Postcard by publisher Brück & Sohn in Meißen.

Scala’s coding style advised to use 2 spaces of indentation, but that was before Scala 3’s optional braces, which introduces significant indentation.

What's the difference between OOP classes and Higher-order Function (HOF)?

This is my cat, Zuzi.

In Java and other JVM languages, “volatile” reads and writes are part of the concurrency toolbox.

Here's a fairly straightforward Scala 3 sample, using significant indentation.

In Scala, how do we model enumerations of values?

The database schema should be described as code, in your repository.

Kotlin Coroutines are usually integrated in Java code via Java’s CompletableFuture, but a tighter integration might be possible with Cats-Effect.

We are using a combination of Akka and Cats-Effect (ver. 3) for building payment processors.

A screenshot of my browser window, showing the 3 monitors that I configured in Monit, all green-lit, indicating that everything is fine.

Friday the 13th just passed 😳 and what a great day it was to finally leave Twitter.