[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #42 — Momentum, Performance and Better Defaults
From personal motivation to leaner JVM services and more resilient architectures
🎯 Featured Article
🧠 How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done: 6 Secrets To Motivation
A psychology- and neuroscience-backed breakdown of what actually drives sustained motivation, with practical techniques that translate well to engineering work and long-term projects.
⬢ Define clear goals to replace vague intentions with concrete targets
⬢ Design supportive environments that reduce friction and encourage action
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Align work with meaning to increase intrinsic motivation
⬢ Track small wins daily to maintain momentum
⬢ Plan for obstacles instead of relying on optimism alone
⬢ Use accountability to stay consistent over time
☕ JVM Corner
⚙️ A Better Way of Creating Dev Services
Introduces a new Dev Services API in Quarkus 3.25 that improves test isolation, startup behavior and resource usage.
⬢ Reduce conflicts and overhead during test discovery
🧪 Avoiding Fake Drift in Unit Tests
Explains how to keep fake implementations aligned with real ones while preserving the benefits of behavior-focused testing.
⬢ Prefer behavior verification over implementation coupling
🍃 Spring Updates
🔎 REST Query Language with Spring Data JPA Specifications
Shows how to build a flexible search API using JPA Specifications for complex filtering needs.
⬢ Compose dynamic queries without brittle custom SQL
⬢ Expose expressive filtering through a clean REST interface
📉 Our Spring Boot App Used 2GB RAM. I Reduced It to 200MB. Here’s How
A hands-on case study of diagnosing and fixing excessive memory usage in a real-world Spring Boot service.
⬢ Profile memory behavior instead of guessing
⬢ Tune defaults and dependencies to dramatically cut footprint
🪵 Logging Queries with Spring Data Cassandra
Walks through practical ways to log and debug Cassandra queries in Spring Boot applications.
⬢ Improve observability for database interactions
🚫 The Hidden Performance Killer: Understanding Open Session in View in Spring Boot
Explains why OSIV can silently degrade performance and how to fix the underlying issues.
⬢ Understand OSIV trade-offs under real load
⬢ Eliminate lazy-loading surprises in production
🔍 Extra Reads
Engineering Practice & Architecture
🔧 Version Your Cache Keys to Survive Rolling Deployments — Explains how cache versioning prevents subtle production failures during schema changes.
🧱 Options Appraisal: A Pragmatic Guide for Architecture Decisions — Presents a lightweight framework for comparing architectural options and trade-offs.
☠️ The Poison Pill Request — Shows how a single malformed request can cascade into full fleet failure.
Developer Productivity & Craft
📝 How To Review Code — Shares hard-earned lessons on effective code reviews from decades of experience.
🐳 The Ultimate Guide to Docker Build Cache — Breaks down how Docker caching really works and how to exploit it.
🔁 Rebuilding Event-Driven Read Models in a Safe and Resilient Way — Covers strategies for safely regenerating read models in event-driven systems.
Careers, Learning & Perspective
🧠 Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself — Reflects on hard-earned, non-transferable lessons.
🎯 The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice — Explains how focused practice drives real improvement.
🏢 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google — Distills career lessons about impact beyond just writing code.
Trends & Industry Signals
☁️ I’m Changing My Mind About Serverless — A candid reassessment of serverless architecture trade-offs.
🤖 Opus 4.5 Is Going to Change Everything — Argues that AI coding agents are closer to replacing developers than many expect.
👩💻 Coding Again — Observes how LLMs are pulling experienced engineers back into hands-on coding.
📉 6 Incredibly Hyped Software Trends That Failed to Deliver — A retrospective on overhyped ideas that didn’t live up to expectations.
🌱 The Suck Is Why We’re Here — Explores growth, creativity, and embracing discomfort.
🚀 Try to Take My Position: The Best Promotion Advice I Ever Got — Career advice focused on acting at the next level before you’re promoted.
🧩 How I Hire Engineers — Discusses hiring with an emphasis on community and real-world impact.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.