[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #27 — From Event Flow to AI-Powered Code
Architectural Hard Truths, Optimizing Spring Tests and the Decision-Making Framework for Engineers.
🎯 Featured Article
📡 Why are Event-Driven Systems Hard?
Event-driven architectures promise scalability, but introduce complexity in debugging, handling failures and achieving consistency.
⬢ Managing message format versions is critical for long-lived systems.
⬢ Observability, idempotency and eventual consistency remain the hardest trade-offs.
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Spring Boot continues to dominate back-end frameworks.
⬢ JVM introduces lazy constants for more flexible yet optimized constant handling.
⬢ Industry debates span AI coding workflows, package management and software decision-making strategies.
☕ JVM Corner
📦 JEP draft: Lazy Constants (Second Preview)
Lazy constants provide JVM-level optimizations similar to final fields, but with more flexible initialization.
⬢ Constants remain immutable while deferring setup until needed.
⬢ Balances performance optimization with runtime flexibility.
🍃 Spring Updates
🚀 I Tried Every Backend Framework — Here’s Why Only Spring Boot Survived
A firsthand comparison of back-end frameworks concludes that Spring Boot offers unmatched scalability and maintainability.
⬢ Other frameworks shine in tutorials, but falter at production scale.
⬢ Spring Boot’s ecosystem and stability make it the long-term winner.
📊 Mastering Observability in Spring Boot Microservices
A practical guide to observability using metrics, logs, and traces for production-grade Spring systems.
⬢ Implements a full-stack observability pipeline.
⬢ Strengthens resilience and monitoring for microservices.
🧪 Optimizing Spring Integration Tests at Scale
Exploring ways to make large-scale integration testing with Spring faster and more efficient.
⬢ Identifies bottlenecks with TestContainers.
🔍 Spring Debugger: ApplicationContext at Your Fingertips
IntelliJ’s new Spring Debugger plugin lets developers inspect the entire ApplicationContext directly during debugging.
⬢ Simplifies debugging of Spring Boot applications.
🔍 Extra Reads
AI & Developer Workflows
🤖 Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters’ — Senior developers share the pros and cons of managing AI-assisted coding.
🤔 To vibe or not to vibe — Martin Fowler examines the nuanced trade-offs of AI-generated code reviews.
📊 How people actually use ChatGPT vs Claude — Usage data shows ChatGPT is task-oriented, while Claude leans toward automation.
Software Craft & Career
🛠️ How to keep package.json under control — Dependency hygiene tips for sustainable JavaScript projects.
⚡ How Software Engineers Make Productive Decisions — A framework for faster, reversible decision-making.
👥 Your First 10 Users > Your First 10 Features — Why early user validation matters more than polishing features.
Ecosystem & Industry Shifts
💎 The RubyGems Coup — A dive into the governance shakeup at RubyGems.
🎬 Empowering Netflix Engineers with Incident Management — Inside Netflix’s reliability playbook.
📡 Announcing Cloudflare Email Service’s private beta — Cloudflare expands into email infrastructure.
Culture, Burnout & the Web
🧠 The Attention Diet — Why constant interruptions undermine productivity.
💼 When the Job Search Becomes Impossible — Three phases of burnout in the modern job hunt.
🌐 Resurrect the Old Web — A nostalgic look at simpler online interactions.
🔎 Everything that’s wrong with Google Search in one image — How pay-to-rank distorts search results.
📊 The Top Programming Languages 2025 — Python holds the crown, but AI is shifting language adoption.
🌐 MESH: I tried HTMX, then ditched it — Exploring web frameworks beyond JavaScript.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.