[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #25 — September 15th, 2025
Exploring the latest in engineering, JVM, Spring and beyond.
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
➜ Open source: often driven by one person, not an organization
➜ App tracking remains a privacy nightmare — say no to unnecessary apps
➜ Goodbye IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition after 16 years
➜ New Spring 7 resilience features: @ConcurrencyLimit & @Retryable
➜ Outbox pattern in 2025: still useful or outdated?
🎯 Featured Article
💡 Open Source is one person
Many of the tools powering the internet are maintained by a single developer. This raises questions about resilience, security and sustainability of the ecosystem.
➜ Open source fragility lies in over-reliance on individuals
➜ Global software infrastructure depends on “invisible maintainers”
☕ JVM Corner
🧰 Goodbye to IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition after 16 years!
IntelliJ IDEA is moving to a unified distribution model, ending the long-standing community edition.
➜ Impacts students and open-source developers relying on free edition
➜ Raises discussion about IDE licensing and developer tooling costs
🤖 10 ChatGPT Prompts Every Java Developer Should Use
Turn ChatGPT into your personal Java reviewer, optimizer, and coach.
➜ Prompts for code reviews, optimizations, and bug detection
➜ Helps Java devs improve productivity and learning
🧩 Walmart Java Interview Questions That Almost Broke My Brain (Part-1)
A firsthand look at tough Java interview challenges.
➜ Complex problem-solving scenarios tested in real interviews
➜ Shows how large companies raise the technical bar
📢 Java News Roundup: Sep 2025
Latest updates across the Java ecosystem.
➜ JEP 517 targeted for JDK 26
➜ TornadoVM, Micronaut, Quarkus, and Kafka updates
☕ Fibers in my Coffee: Go’s Concurrency in Java’s Loom
Comparing Go-style concurrency with Project Loom in Java.
➜ Loom simplifies concurrency, but trade-offs remain
➜ Bridges lessons from Go into the Java world
🛠️ Clean Design, Strong Client: The Elasticsearch Java SDK
Exploring the design of the Elasticsearch Java SDK.
➜ Balances usability with design trade-offs
➜ A case study in API design decisions
🍃 Spring Updates
⚡ Stop Building Basic Spring Boot Apps: Master These 5 Advanced Techniques
Take Spring Boot beyond CRUD.
➜ Use custom Actuator endpoints and health indicators
➜ Improve monitoring, troubleshooting, and resilience
🔄 Core Spring Resilience Features: @ConcurrencyLimit, @Retryable, and RetryTemplate
Spring 7 brings new resilience features.
➜ Native support for concurrency throttling
➜ Built-in retry capabilities improve fault tolerance
🚀 Optimizing Spring Boot Startup Time
JVM vs Native image: which is faster?
➜ Startup time matters for cloud-native microservices
➜ Benchmarks show trade-offs across configurations
🛠️ Debugging Spring Method Annotations Using Lightrun
Better debugging without redeploys.
➜ Lightrun supports live annotation debugging
➜ Increases developer productivity and reduces downtime
🔐 Access API Moves to Spring Security Access
Spring Security modernizes its authorization API.
➜ Cleaner, more flexible API design
➜ Paves the way for future extensions
📖 How I document production-ready Spring Boot applications
Making documentation part of development.
➜ Strategies for maintainable documentation
➜ Real-world examples from production systems
🔍 Extra Reads
📱 App tracking: Why it’s bad and how to stop it — Shops increasingly push intrusive apps — here’s how to resist.
🎶 Vibe Coding as a Coding Veteran — A 40-year veteran explores AI pair programming with Cursor.
📋 Convenient ‘Copy as cURL’ — Debug and share API requests with ease.
🧩 Don’t Just LeetCode; Follow the Coding Patterns Instead — A better way to prepare for coding interviews.
📦 Outbox Pattern in 2025 — Still relevant in a streaming-first world?
🧪 Why Most Unit Tests Are Useless — Rethinking the value of traditional testing.
🔍 5 Ways Static Code Analysis Can Improve Developer Experience — Beyond compilers: improving DX with static analysis.
🏗️ Tech Debt: Understanding its Business Impact — Clarifying the impact of technical debt.
📜 The story of how RSS beat Microsoft — How syndication resisted corporate control.
💼 Being good isn’t enough — Why careers require more than just technical skill.
🐳 Why I Ditched Docker for Podman — A developer’s case for moving from Docker to Podman.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.