[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #40 — Writing, Threads and Pragmatic Engineering
From public writing impact to virtual threads, Spring Boot 4 and rethinking engineering dogma
🎯 Featured Article
📝 The impact of technical blogging
A synthesis of interviews with experienced tech bloggers exploring the unexpected outcomes of writing in public, beyond visibility or personal branding.
⬢ Highlight career opportunities emerging indirectly from consistent blogging
⬢ Show how writing clarifies thinking and shapes technical judgment
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Explore how public writing influences careers and technical growth
⬢ Examine virtual threads moving from theory into production systems
⬢ Prepare for Spring Boot 4 migrations and observability changes
⬢ Reconsider long-held engineering assumptions and architectural choices
☕ JVM Corner
⚙️ Java News Roundup: GlassFish, TornadoVM, Spring Shell, WildFly, Hibernate, Kotlin
A comprehensive snapshot of recent JVM ecosystem releases and milestones.
⬢ Track major framework and runtime version progress
🧵 Thread Dumps and Project Loom (Virtual Threads)
An explanation of how virtual threads change thread diagnostics and debugging.
⬢ Understand differences between platform and virtual thread dumps
🚀 Virtual Threads in the Real World: Fast, Robust Java Microservices with Helidon
A real-world account of Helidon’s rewrite around virtual threads and lessons learned.
⬢ Evaluate performance and scalability trade-offs in production
⬢ Anticipate virtual-thread-first frameworks going forward
🟣 The Ultimate Guide to Successfully Adopting Kotlin in a Java-Dominated Environment
A roadmap for introducing Kotlin without destabilizing teams or systems.
⬢ Address organizational and cultural adoption challenges
⬢ Reduce migration risk through incremental strategies
🗄️ Database migrations with Exposed
A lightweight approach to managing schema migrations in Kotlin-based backends.
🖥️ Minimal setup for Compose Desktop
A stripped-down guide to building desktop apps with Compose without full multiplatform complexity.
⬢ Reduce boilerplate for small desktop tools
⬢ Focus on fast iteration and minimal configuration
🍃 Spring Updates
🪵 Logging in Spring Boot
A practical overview of logging configuration options in Spring Boot.
⬢ Compare Logback and Log4j2 trade-offs
⬢ Tune logging for clarity and performance
⚠️ Spring Boot 4: The 7 Breaking Changes Every Developer Must Know
A focused guide to the most impactful breaking changes in Spring Boot 4.
⬢ Identify high-risk migration areas early
⬢ Quantify upgrade impact with concrete examples
📡 Event-Driven Microservices With Orkes Conductor — Spring
An introduction to orchestrating event-driven workflows with Spring and Conductor.
⬢ Coordinate microservices using explicit workflows
📊 OpenTelemetry with Spring Boot 4: The New Starter You’ve Been Waiting For
A walkthrough of Spring Boot 4’s official OpenTelemetry starter.
⬢ Enable vendor-neutral observability with minimal setup
⬢ Collect traces, metrics and logs consistently
🐳 Dockerizing a Spring Boot Application
A step-by-step guide to containerizing Spring Boot applications.
⬢ Build lightweight images with Alpine Linux
⬢ Manage multi-container setups efficiently
🔍 Extra Reads
AI & Developer Productivity
🤖 Our new report: AI code creates 1.7x more problems — An empirical study comparing AI-generated and human-written code quality.
🤝 My AI Colleague: Claude, the good, the bad, the UglAI — Lessons learned from using AI in compliance-heavy environments.
🧠 What Actually Is Claude Code’s Plan Mode? — A closer look at planning modes in AI-assisted development.
Architecture & Engineering Practices
🏗️ Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar — A case study on consolidating microservices into a monolith.
🧩 5 engineering dogmas it’s time to retire — A challenge to widely accepted engineering “best practices.”
Performance, Platforms & Systems
⚡ Generating rich link previews 10x faster — A deep dive into performance optimization.
🍎 The Anatomy of a macOS App — An exploration of macOS application structure and evolution.
📦 Introduction to Netflix Hollow — A primer on low-latency data distribution at scale.
🗣️ ‘Slop’ won Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year — What 2025’s words of the year reveal about internet culture and trust.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.