This year was a very light year in blogging for me -- even by my recent standards -- for a lot of reasons that probably aren't of much interest to others. That said, I want to close the year out as I have for years with a Christmas post. I realize that many of you may not celebrate Christmas, and for others it's just another holiday plus lights and gifts and family. I would be remiss, though, if I didn't close the year sharing the real, historical meaning of Christmas: the birth of a baby sent to atone for the sins of the world. There's a lot of theology there that I won't unpack here, but, if you'd like to hear more -- or try to convince me that I'm wrong :) -- I'm here for you.

Here's a beautiful setting from Evan Wickham of some of that theology. I hope it blesses you as it did me.

Merry Christmas!

I recently found myself in need of having two different Testcontainers communicate with each other. To someone more familiar with Docker, the solution might have been more obvious, but, alas, I am not that man. Testcontainer Slack , I got a pointer, so I thought I'd share it here in case it might help someone else.

As 2023 comes to a close, I want to take a slightly different approach to my Christmas greetings. I'd like to share with you a Christmas carol, and the story behind it.

The poem, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, explores the contrasting despair in his heart against the hope of Christmas. Having lost his wife to a fire, and having his son critically wounded in the Civil War, Longfellow struggled with his faith which spoke of "peace on earth, goodwill to man" while he watched the injustice and violence in the country at war around him. At the end of the poem, written on Christmas day in 1863, he concludes with the confession that, while things seem bleak,“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The Wrong shall fail,The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

With wars and violence all over the globe, that statement is still true today. One day two thousand years ago, Jesus became a human, in the form of a tiny infant, as the final step in righting wrongs and prevailing over evil finally and fully. Christmas, then, points to Easter, and should serve as a reminder that, while evil does seem prevalent now, the day is coming when God finally says "Enough!" and declares judgment. My prayer, as it is every Christmas season (and, indeed, every day) is that this year will be the year you see Christmas as more than a chance for time off and getting and receiving gifts, but as the offering of the greatest gift of all: salvation through Jesus Christ.

Merry Christmas!

A friend of mine is a very good Angular developer. For a project he's been asked to help with, though, he finds himself needing to do some backend work. Since that's a bit outside his wheelhouse, he asked me for advice. In this post, I'll write up what I told him in case it might be of use to someone else.

One of the toughest challenges facing a mature product like WildFly is adding features without breaking existing users. It's especially difficult when that project serves as the foundation for a commercial product downstream that requires a higher degree of stability. While WildFly is a wholly independent project, it's not completely immune to concerns that EAP may have with regard to API stability, long term support, etc. That has made it difficult at times to change WildFly, though efforts like WildFly Preview have certainly helped.

With that in mind, I'd like to draw your attention to a project WildFly/EAP engineer extraordinaire, Paul Ferraro recently announced on the wildfly-dev email list . You can click through to the list archive , or read a more nicely-formatted copy of the email below. Either way, we would greatly value any feedback you might provide.