🎬 Highlights & Trends

Devoxx Belgium 2025 is a wrap, and it was an edition to remember, with an unmistakable focus on the next evolution in software: AI Agents and the modern Java 25 ecosystem. It is a real treat that the organization put the talks online so quickly, allowing us to dive straight into popular and pressing topics like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Stable Values, and Structured Concurrency. I’ve since done a deep-dive into the talks, and after some necessary wrestling, this is my top five. This certainly doesn’t take away from the other talks; as always, the quality was amazing.

Back in 2019 I created a Chrome Extension called “Starify Github Links”.

I probably just discovered sindresorhus awesome lists. And while awesome lists are, well, awesome, the problem is that while it has so many truly excellent links, some random guy that created a really niche thing easily ends up in there as well.

So how do you know what to spend your time on, GitHub stars, obviously!

Needed to get around installing git lfs because I’m adding large media files to Obsidian which I’m syncing with a private github repository.

git-lfs/git-lfs : Git extension for versioning large files

It stores your large files on a separate server and works seamlessly with your normal git workflow.

Install

choco install git-lfs -y
git lfs install

Every change to a blog post on this website took a whopping 20 second delay before I could see the result.

The solution was really simple, really. And was committed in the README as a TODO over 3 years ago.

Companion to the ClosedXML series, specifically to Part 2: Formulas.
Covering the ClosedXML syntax and implemented functions.

See the ClosedXML example code for of all the functions as UnitTests.

Miscellaneous features

ClosedXML can do a whole lot more for you. This post covers some interesting stuff that didn’t really fit anywhere else.

In case your users want to continue working with the Excels after generation.

Not a problem for ClosedXML. Instead of calculating values and writing them to an excel, leverage the power of Excel formulas.

Quick tutorial about creating xlsx Excels with C# and the ClosedXML nuget package.

The blog posts only covers the most important functionality. More extensive code examples can be found in the GitHub project.