[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #21 — August 18th, 2025
Weekly insights from the world of software.
This week’s edition covers insights across engineering: from Java and Spring frameworks to smarter API design and scaling strategies. You’ll also find practical tips on code reviews, productivity hacks, and how AI is shaping developer workflows.
Java & Spring
- Stop Using Lombok: Time to Move On?: “You are working on a Java project, drowning in boilerplate code — getters, setters, constructors, equals(), hashCode(), and whatnot.”
- The Spring Pattern That Impressed My Manager (and Dumps if-else): “Discover how the Service Locator Pattern, powered by Spring’s ServiceLocatorFactoryBean can make your code cleaner.”
- What is Java Spring Boot by IBM?: “Java Spring Boot (Spring Boot) is a tool that makes developing web application and microservices with Java Spring Framework faster and easier.”
- I Profiled My Spring Boot App — And Reduced CPU Usage by 70%: “How I discovered hidden performance killers and made my app fly without scaling up.”
- Preparing for Spring Boot 4 and Spring Framework 7: What’s New?: “As the Java landscape continues its rapid evolution, developers eagerly anticipate major upgrades to foundational frameworks.”
APIs & System Design
- Stop Messing Up Your API Versions!: “If you’re using /v1/products and /v2/products, this article is for you.”
- API Design 101: “From Basics to Best Practices.”
- 16 Common REST API Status Code Mistakes to Avoid in 2025: “Did you know 70+% API bugs come from misused status codes?”
- Scaling Any System to Millions or Billions of Users: “When we first launched our app, scaling was the last thing on our minds.”
- How I Learned System Design: “The honest journey from total confusion to clarity.”
Software Craft & Tools
- How To Review Code: “I’ve been reviewing other people’s code for a while now.”
- Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck: “For years, I’ve felt that writing lines of code was never the bottleneck in software engineering.”
- Bazel Plugin Release: “The Bazel Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA Is Now Generally Available!”
AI & Productivity
- I Want Everything Local: “Building My Offline AI Workspace.”
- No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive: “Curing Your AI 10x Engineer Imposter Syndrome.”
- How I Code with AI on a budget/free: “A personal guide on using AI Code Prep GUI, Cline, and various free AI web interfaces like Gemini, Grok, Deepseek, and Poe for cost-effective coding and debugging.”
Misc & Personal Productivity
- Why We Stopped Using Docker in Local Development: “It works in Docker. Just rebuild the container.”
- I Tried Every Todo App and Ended Up With a .txt File: “I’ve tried them all. Notion, Todoist, Things 3, OmniFocus, Asana, Trello, Any.do, TickTick.”
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.