[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #37 — Mastering Ambiguity & Evolving Ecosystems
How seniority, JVM evolution and Spring innovation shape modern engineering
🎯 Featured Article
🧭 What Actually Makes You Senior
A clear breakdown of why reducing ambiguity — not checklists — is the core competency of truly senior engineers. This piece frames seniority as a skill in clarity, not years or titles.
⬢ Explains how ambiguity reduction drives better decision-making and ownership
⬢ Highlights why architecture, leadership and communication all stem from this root skill
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Seniority is defined by clarifying uncertainty, not experience
⬢ JVM ecosystem moves fast: new releases, new stacks, new patterns
⬢ Spring ecosystem sees major updates — from API versioning to gRPC GA
⬢ Extra reads highlight resilience, documentation drift, security and design fundamentals
☕ JVM Corner
🧩 Java News Roundup: Spring Cloud, Quarkus, Hibernate ORM, JobRunr, LangChain4j, Java Operator SDK
A comprehensive overview of recent JVM ecosystem releases and RCs.
⬢ Covers updates across frameworks, reactive stacks, build tools and security
⬢ Highlights growing momentum around Java 25+ and modern operator tooling
🔧 Kotlin 2.2.0: Game-Changing Features
A look at Kotlin 2.2.0 and how its new features improve maintainability and developer productivity.
⬢ Introduces enhancements for cleaner, more expressive code
🧱 Why We Built ExoQuery
A deep dive into a new Kotlin-first querying library.
⬢ Aims to provide intuitive, lightweight database access
⬢ Focuses on type safety and developer-friendly ergonomics
🕳️ Help, My Java Object Vanished
A JVM engineer’s debugging journey into disappearing objects during HotSpot development.
🧭 Non-null variable declaration in Java using instanceof patterns
Shows how pattern matching can combine null-checking and assignment.
⬢ Demonstrates practical inline null-safety idioms
⚡ MYRA Stack — Modern Java FFM Libraries
A production-grade Java ecosystem built on the FFM API.
⬢ Targets ultra-low-latency workloads
🧓 So Long and Thanks for All the Applets
A retrospective on the removal of java.applet in JDK 26.
⬢ Marks the end of a long-deprecated API
🍃 Spring Updates
📚 6 Must Read Spring Framework Books for 2026
A curated list of essential Spring resources for staying current.
⬢ Covers Spring Boot, Security and modern Spring architecture
🧩 Rethinking Spring Application Integration Testing
Advocates aligning tests with functional decomposition instead of horizontal slices.
⬢ Promotes more meaningful, cohesive integration tests
🔧 Spring Boot Application Properties
Guidance for structuring and managing Spring Boot configuration.
⬢ Emphasizes clarity and maintainability
⬢ Addresses common pitfalls in property organization
🔀 Spring Boot Built-in API Versioning
Explains Spring Boot 4’s new native API versioning support.
⬢ Simplifies lifecycle management for evolving APIs
🛰️ Spring gRPC 1.0.0 Goes GA
Official 1.0 release with Java 25 and Spring Boot 4 support.
⬢ Signals gRPC becoming a first-class citizen in Spring apps
🔍 Extra Reads
AI & Industry
🤖 Anthropic Acquires Bun — Strategic acquisition as Claude Code crosses a major revenue milestone.
🌐 The Junior Hiring Crisis — How AI is removing the apprenticeship ladder.
🏗️ Writing a good CLAUDE.md — Best practices for agent-enabled engineering configuration.
Resilience, Growth & Work
🌱 Becoming Unblockable — Techniques to maintain forward progress.
🔧 All It Takes Is for One to Work Out — A story of resilience through repeated setbacks.
🌐 Knowing When to Leave — A reflection on timing and transitions.
🎓 On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads — Lessons from a decade of writing.
Web, Performance & Security
🔧 The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 — Why most sites still fail Core Web Vitals.
🏗️ Critical Vulnerabilities in React & Next.js — RCE vulnerabilities that require urgent patching.
🌱 AV1 Now Powers 30% of Netflix Streaming — How AV1 improves streaming quality and bandwidth efficiency.
🌐 10 Usability Heuristics — Timeless principles for interaction design.
Architecture, Documentation & Systems
🔎 When Documentation Lies — How to detect documentation drift.
🔮 If Your Microservices Keep Breaking — Twelve rules for stable microservice systems.
📘 Longevity Without Lock-In — Why staying on older versions can be strategically correct.
🛡️ Tim Ferriss Promised Freedom… — Critique of the modern indie hacker “gold rush.”
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.