Search

Dark theme | Light theme

September 19, 2026

Use Breakpoints Debugging Lombok Constructor Annotations In IntelliJ IDEA

As a consultant I am part of a lot of different Java projects. Some of these project use Lombok. When you use a Lombok annotation code gets generated when the code is compiled. This code is not visible in the IntelliJ IDEA editor which could be a problem when you want to debug your application and need to add a breakpoint for the generated code. Suppose you have a Java class with a simple constructor without using Lombok annotations. You can place a breakpoint in the constructor and when you debug the application in IntelliJ IDEA the execution stops at the breakpoint. Now you can check for example the values of parameters that are passed into the constructor call. But when you use a Lombok annotation like @RequiredArgsConstructor the code for the constructor is generated and not visible in your editor. If you want to check the values of parameters passed into the constructor you need to set a breakpoint at the line that has the @RequiredArgsConstructor statement. When you debug your application IntelliJ IDEA will stop execution when the constructor is invoked and you can check values of parameters.

September 12, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Write XML With Comments

You can learn about writing XML with Nushell n a previous blogpost. To add a XML comment you can use a record with the key tag and string value !. The content key should be a string value that is the actual comment. The result after you use the to xml is a XML text that has the format of a XML comment: <!-- <content> -→.

Nushell Niceties: Writing XML

In Nushell almost everything is a data structure. This mind set is also applied to XML structures in Nushell. A XML tag can be described as a record with the attributes tag, attributes and content. The tag attribute has a string value that is the tag name. Attributes are defined with a record structure. The key is the attribute name and the value is the attribute value. Finally the content attribute is a list containing a string value for text content or new record structures for nested XML tags. With this basic record structure you can describe XML content. To actually transform it to a XML string value you can use the command to xml. This command will use the data in the record structure and will output XML.

September 2, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Split String By Words

To split a string value by the words in the string you can use the command split words. The result is a list where each element is a word from the original string. You can use the option --min-word-length (or the short option -l) to specify a minimal length of the words that should be split on. When a word length is less than the given option value it will not be in the resulting list.

July 28, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Splitting String Values Into A Table

You can use the split column command to split a string value or a list of string values into a table. You need to specify a delimiter to split the value on. In the resulting table the elements are stored in columns. By default the columns have the name column<index> where index is the number of the column starting with 0. It is possible to define your own column names by specifying their names as parameters for the split column command. This way the resulting table will have more meaningful names.

July 19, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Finding Same Elements In Lists Or Tables

The intersect command can be used on lists and tables to find the same elements that are in the input list or table and a provided list or table. The input is passed to the command and the other list or table is an argument for the intersect command.

July 15, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Generating Passwords

Since Nushell 0.114.0 you can use the random pass command to generate a random password of 12 characters. Nushell will use a combination of letters, numbers and symbols. It is possible to generate a password with a different length using the command-line option --chars (or -c) followed by the size of the password. The minimal length is 4 characters and the maximum size is 128 characters.

If you don’t want to include symbols then you must use the option --no-symbols (or -s). To exclude numbers the option --no-numbers or short-hand -n must be used. And finally to exclude lowercase characters use --no-lowercase (or -l) and to exclude uppercase characters use --no-uppercase (or -u).

To support a requirement that at least one character, one number and one symbol is needed the option --require-each-type must be used. By default Nushell will not use the ambiguous characters 0, O, 1 and l in the same password, because it can be hard to read the differences between the characters with some fonts. In order to use these characters in the same generated password you must the option --include-ambiguous. Also the characters i, 1 and l are not used together, but if you specify the option --include-similar these characters can be used in the same generated password.

April 19, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Wrapping External Commands With def --wrapped

The def keyword in Nushell is used to define a custom command. By adding the --wrapped flag you can tell Nushell to accept unknown flags and arguments and pass them on as strings. In the command parameters you use a "rest" parameter defined by …​ to capture the remaining arguments. Then in the command body you use the spread operator …​ to expand them again. This is very useful when you want to create a small wrapper around an external command with lots of options, but without having to define all those options yourself.

April 4, 2026

Kotlin Kandy: Get Text Before Or After A Delimiter

Kotlin adds the substringBefore, substringBeforeLast, substringAfter and substringAfterLast extension functions to the String class. Instead of using indices to get a substring you can use a string or character value. The functions without Last use the first occurrence of the delimiter and the methods with Last use the last occurrence. If the delimiter is not found the original string is returned. You can supply a value that should be returned when the delimiter is not found.

April 3, 2026

Kotlin Kandy: Get A Random Element From A Collection

Kotlin has very useful extensions functions for working with collections. These extension functions make working with collections more easy and fun. One of the extension functions is the random function. When you call random() Kotlin returns a single element from the collection using the default random source. The function also accepts a Random instance as argument. This instance has a seeded value to return repeatable random values.

April 2, 2026

Kotlin Kandy: Transform Map Keys Or Values With mapKeys And mapValues

Sometimes you want to transform only the keys in a Map, or only transform the values. Kotlin has two useful methods to achieve this: mapKeys and mapValues. You can use mapKeys to transform the keys of the map while keeping the values the same. With mapValues you can transform the values of the map while keeping the keys the same. Both methods accept a lambda function as asrgument of type Map.Entry and must return the new key or value. In order to transform the keys or values and add the result to an existing Map you can use the methods mapKeysTo and mapValuesTo. The first argument is the existing (mutable) Map and the second argument is the lambda function.

Nushell Niceties: Check If Semantic Version Is A Match

In a previous blogpost you can learn about the semver command in Nushell to transform a string value into a semver type. The command has a subcommand match-req. You can use this command to check if a version matches part of the semantic version parts. The result is a boolean value. The version to compare with doesn’t have to defined fully, but could exist of only the major, minor or patch parts. The value you pass can also be used to check if a version is greater or smaller than a given version. A range with a lower and upper version to match on can be defined as well. The boundary values are separated by a comma.

March 20, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Sorting Version Values With Semver Ordering

The semver Nushell plugin can be used to work with string values as semver type as you can see in a previous post. You can use the semver sort command to sort string values with ordering rules for semantic versions. With natural ordering of string values a value of 10.0.1 is placed before 2.1.0, but if you use semver sort the ordering will be correct. The command will look at all the parts of the semver type. So a major version of 2 is placed before 10. If the major version part is the same than the minor part is used for ordering and so on. To sort in descending order you can use the option --reverse or the short option -r.

March 18, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Bumping Semantic Version

In a previous blogpost you can learn about the semver command in Nushell to transform a string value into a semver type. With the semver bump command you can increase one of the components of the semver type. For example to increase the major version part you can use semver bump major. This command will also update the minor and patch parts if needed. The result is a semver type and you can use into value to transform it to a string type.

February 17, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Transform Values Into Semver Types

Nushell can be extended with plugins to have more functionality or types that are not part of standard Nushell. If you want to work with string values that are actually semantic version values (https://semver.org) you can use the Nushell SemVer plugin. The plugin must be added to Nushell by using the command plugin add <location of plugin>. You can check with plugin list command if the plugin is available. This command also shows commands that the plugin adds to Nushell.

The command into semver can be used to convert string values into a semver type. The semver type has 5 properties: major, minor, patch, pre and build. You can use dot notation to get the values for these properties or use the get command. In the following command a string value is transformed to a semver type: let v = '4.0.2' | into semver. And with $v.major you can extract the major part of the semver value and it returns 4.
Records with the keys major, minor, patch, pre and build can be transformed to a semver string with the semver from-record command. And to transform a semver type to a record you can use the command semver into-record.

January 28, 2026

Awesome AssertJ: Use isEqualToNormalizingNewlines To Assert With Text Block

A Java text block is an easy way to have a multiline string value. But there is a catch if we want to use a text block with the assertion method isEqualTo. Suppose you have written a piece of code that create a new string value where the line endings are defined using System.lineSeparator(). The string value would have the line ending \n on Linux and MacOS systems, and the line ending \r\n on Windows system. But a Java text block will always use the line ending \n on every platform, including the Windows platform. If you would run your tests on a Windows platform then the assertion using isEqualTo will fail, but the test will pass on Linux or MacOS systems. This is a problem if you are working with developers using different operating systems. Therefore it is better to use the method isEqualToNormalizingNewlines for these type of assertions. AssertJ will make sure the line endings are the same and the tests will pass independent of the operating system the tests are run on.

January 25, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Checking If Value Is In List Or String Or Key In Record

Nushell has the in operator to check if a value is an element of list. With the same in operator you can check if a string is a substring of another string. And finally you can use the in operator to check if a key is in a record. When you use the operator the value you want to check is defined before the operator and the list, other string or record is defined after the operator.
The not-in operator is the opposite of the in operator and checks if a value is not in list or other string or key in a record.
It is also possible to use the has and not-has operators to do the same checks, but the value you want to check is set after the operator. The list, other string or record is set before the operator.

January 8, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Calculating The Average Of Numeric Values

In order to calculate an average for a list of numbers, file sizes, durations, or range of numbers, or a table with columns containing numeric values you can use the math avg command. This command is part of the math module of Nushell. When the input is a list then the result is a single value with the average of all values in the list. If you use a table as input the result is a record where the key is the column name and the value the average of all values in that column. Finally it is possible to have a single value as input and the result is the same value obviously.

Nushell Niceties: Calculating The Sum Of Numeric Values

The math module in Nushell has a lot of useful commands to work with numeric values. You can use the math sum command to calculate the sum of a multiple numeric values. The input of the command can be a list of numbers, durations, file sizes, or a range or table with columns containing numeric values. The result is a single numeric value with the sum of all values in the input. The math sum command can also be used on a table with multiple numeric columns. It will return a record with the sum of all values for each column.

January 6, 2026

Nushell Niceties: Getting Minimum And Maximum Values

In Nushell we can use a lot a math related commands to get for example the minimum and maximum values of a list of numbers. In the math module you can find the commands math min and math max. You can use these commands to get the minimum and maximum values of a list of numbers, durations, file sizes, a range and tables.