[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #36 — Mastering Data, Modern Java & Smarter Engineering Systems
A week shaped by stronger data fundamentals, evolving JVM tooling and next-generation Spring capabilities.
🎯 Featured Article
📘 Book Review — Just Use Postgres!
A practical overview of why PostgreSQL remains a cornerstone for modern applications, highlighting capabilities that directly improve performance and developer efficiency.
⬢ Explains high-impact database features for today’s application workloads
⬢ Demonstrates real-world benefits beyond traditional relational usage
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Postgres remains a must-know tool for modern engineering
⬢ The JVM world sees major updates across language features, tooling, open-source governance and AOT improvements
⬢ Spring delivers structural tooling enhancements, AI integration and deeper compile-time processing
⬢ Architecture, productivity, security and Kubernetes practices dominate the broader engineering landscape
☕ JVM Corner
🛠️ When Open Source Isn’t: How OpenRewrite Lost Its Way
Details the implications of OpenRewrite’s relicensing and the resulting OSS governance concerns.
⬢ Highlights legal and trust-related risks
⬢ Underscores the importance of transparent stewardship
📦 How to use Java Records Effectively? Advanced Use-Cases Explained.
Shows powerful, lesser-known patterns for applying Java Records.
⬢ Demonstrates expressive, maintainable record design
⬢ Clarifies advanced domain modeling techniques
🧩 jMolecules 2.0 — Stereotypical
Introduces stereotype-based modeling for architecturally evident Java code.
⬢ Improves large-scale code comprehension
🧰 Open-source IntelliJ IDEA: A Simpler Way to Build and Contribute
Explains the accessibility of IntelliJ IDEA’s open-source platform.
⬢ Encourages community-driven improvements
🚀 Java 25: The ‘No-Boilerplate’ Era Begins
Highlights the LTS release that removes ceremony and boosts runtime efficiency.
🔌 IntelliJ Platform 2025.3: What Plugin Developers Should Know
Provides guidance for plugin compatibility with the next IntelliJ platform release.
⬢ Summarizes breaking changes and helps teams maintain stable integrations
🔍 JD Project
Covers ongoing improvements in Java decompilation capabilities.
⬢ Supports analysis of compiled classes
⬢ Offers tools compatible with new Java versions
⚠️ One Could Simply Add Nullability Check Support… Without Even Noticing It
Shows how JSpecify-based nullability now arrives automatically.
⬢ Improves safety with zero configuration
⬢ Integrates smoothly into existing toolchains
🔧 Amper Update, November 2025 — Extensibility Preview
Shares extensibility advances in JetBrains’ experimental build tool.
⬢ Expands plugin and integration mechanisms
🍃 Spring Updates
🧭 Towards Spring Tools 5 — v1 — Ready for Boot 4 and Framework 7
Introduces tooling support for versioning, functional beans and AOT repositories.
⬢ Enhances ergonomics for modern Spring development
🧱 Towards Spring Tools 5 — v2 — Stereotypes and a New Structural View
Introduces structural views that reflect Spring-level abstractions.
⬢ Enables easier navigation across layers
⬢ Accelerates onboarding and comprehension
🔀 Beyond JSON: Converting Spring AI Tool Response Formats
Explains how to convert LLM tool responses across JSON, TOON, XML, CSV and YAML.
⬢ Enables flexible response optimization
⚡ Spring Data Ahead of Time Repositories — Part 2
Expands on the architecture of compile-time repository generation.
⬢ Improves startup performance
⬢ Reduces runtime query overhead
🧪 Spring Data AOT Repositories: Faster Startup and Build-Time Query Validation
Explores compile-time query validation and AOT performance improvements.
⬢ Detects query errors before deployment
⬢ Saves memory and reduces boot time
🤖 Spring AI Just Solved Java’s AI Problem
Shows how Spring AI simplifies deploying production AI in Java ecosystems.
⬢ Eliminates fragile SDK overhead
⬢ Accelerates integration and shipping speed
📚 Offset and Keyset Pagination with Spring Data JPA
Analyzes trade-offs between pagination approaches.
🔍 Extra Reads
Architecture & Engineering Practice
📐 Modular Design: The Secret Sauce — Why separation of concerns determines long-term system quality.
🏛️ Start Small, Scale Smart: The Real Value of Incremental Architecture — A guide to designing evolvable systems.
🏗️ The Clean Architecture I Wish Someone Had Explained to Me — A pragmatic look at when Clean Architecture makes sense.
🔎 Building a Simple Search Engine That Actually Works — Implementing a minimal search engine inside your existing DB.
Productivity, Teams & Career
📊 The Developer Productivity Paradox — Why faster coding doesn’t equal faster delivery.
🔧 We Stopped Roadmap Work for a Week and Fixed 189 Bugs — The unexpected power of focused fixit weeks.
🎓 Top 5 Software Architecture Udemy Courses for 2026 — A curated list for skill advancement.
🧪 My First Real Rust Project — A JVM developer’s experience adopting Rust.
APIs, Backend & Cloud
🌐 Stop Using REST Like It’s 2010 — Why REST is holding many teams back.
⚙️ Kubernetes Configuration Good Practices — Hard-earned lessons for stable deployments.
🔧 The Art of Performance Tuning — Why code-level inefficiencies overshadow cloud optimizations.
Security, AI & Industry Trends
🛡️ Shai-Hulud Returns: NPM Supply Chain Attack — A large-scale fake runtime attack affecting thousands of packages.
🤖 Why Agents Do Not Write Most of Our Code — A reality check on AI coding agents.
🔮 Tech Predictions for 2026 and Beyond — Trends shaping the next AI-assisted engineering era.
💼 Microsoft Copilot Fall Release — Collaboration and personalization updates in Copilot.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.