[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #41 — Engineering Visibility, JVM Depth and Spring Mastery
How sharing your work, mastering Java internals and evolving Spring practices compound long-term impact
🎯 Featured Article
🧭 Publishing your work increases your luck
Publishing isn’t about instant fame — it’s about increasing surface area for opportunity. This article shows how consistently sharing your work creates more chances for meaningful career and technical breakthroughs.
⬢ Increase opportunity density by making your work discoverable
⬢ Reduce fear-driven stagnation by treating publishing as a habit, not a gamble
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Publish consistently to compound visibility over time
⬢ Deepen JVM understanding to build more predictable systems
⬢ Adopt modern Spring patterns for scalability and clarity
⬢ Question defaults with healthy engineering cynicism
☕ JVM Corner
⚡ Introduction to HikariCP
A concise introduction to HikariCP, the de-facto standard JDBC connection pool for high-performance Java applications.
⬢ Explain design goals behind minimalism and speed
🧠 The Deprecation of K1 Mode
Explains why K2 is the future of Kotlin tooling and what deprecating K1 means in practice.
⬢ Summarize performance gains in the K2 compiler pipeline
⬢ Clarify migration readiness and feature parity
🖥️ 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal
A call to improve Java’s command-line ergonomics and developer experience.
⬢ Highlight current pain points in CLI workflows
🔒 Explaining Memory Barriers and Java’s Happens Before Guarantees
A practical breakdown of Java’s memory model with focus on what actually matters in concurrency.
⬢ Explain happens-before rules in plain terms
🧹 Java Janitor Jim — Augmenting Java’s Ancient Enum
Utility patterns that modernize Java enums without rewriting the language.
⬢ Improve enum ergonomics with lookup and formatting helpers
🧵 Java Virtual Thread States
An advanced look at how virtual threads map onto traditional thread states.
⬢ Describe expanded state model for virtual threads
🍃 Spring Updates
🌱 Introduction to FaunaDB with Spring
A hands-on overview of integrating Fauna’s distributed database with Spring applications.
⬢ Explore core Fauna features relevant to backend services
⬢ Demonstrate Spring integration patterns
🧬 First-Class Kotlin Serialization Support in Spring Boot 4
Spring Boot 4 elevates Kotlin serialization to a first-class citizen.
⬢ Reduce dependency on Jackson for Kotlin-first projects
⬢ Align serialization with Kotlin language features
🔁 A Guide to RestClient in Spring Boot
A practical guide to Spring Boot’s modern HTTP client.
⬢ Replace RestTemplate with a cleaner API
🏗️ Modular Monolith with Spring Boot — Spring Modulith
A pragmatic approach to structuring large Spring Boot applications.
⬢ Enforce module boundaries without microservices
⬢ Scale complexity with clearer architecture
🔐 The Best Way to Use the Spring Transactional Annotation
Guidance on avoiding common transactional pitfalls.
⬢ Define correct boundaries at the service layer
⬢ Prevent subtle data issues in production
🔄 Integrating Jakarta Data with Spring
Spring 7 enables seamless Jakarta Data integration with proper transaction management.
⬢ Leverage StatelessSession support
⬢ Simplify data access patterns
🔍 Extra Reads
Data, Scale & Infrastructure
📊 What Happens If the Database’s Auto-Increment ID Runs Out? — Explores edge cases of ID exhaustion in large datasets.
🏢 Why I Prefer Multi-Tenant Systems — Weighs complexity tradeoffs in multi-tenant architectures.
📦 Package Managers Keep Using Git as a Database — Explains why this pattern repeatedly fails.
Security & Reliability
🔐 The SSO Wall of Shame — A public list highlighting poor security practices around SSO.
🧨 Processing 630 Million More Pwned Passwords — A look into the scale of modern credential abuse.
Engineering Culture & Learning
🎓 The Power of Exercises — How well-designed exercises shape long-term habits.
🧠 You Can’t Design Software You Don’t Work On — Why real design requires deep system familiarity.
🤨 Software Engineers Should Be a Little Bit Cynical — Advocates healthy skepticism as a professional skill.
🎥 How I Left YouTube — A personal reflection on changing career paths.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.