[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #43 — Investing in Systems, Not Shortcuts
Career moves, JVM performance and architectural choices that compound over time.
🎯 Featured Article
🧭 Just Get a Better Job
This article reframes job changes as long-term investments rather than quick fixes, emphasizing hidden costs, cultural risks and delayed returns that many engineers underestimate.
⬢ Frame career moves as high-stakes investments with a vesting period
⬢ Evaluate organizational architecture and culture before switching
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Treat careers, architectures and platform choices as long-term investments with hidden costs
⬢ Optimize Java applications for startup, warmup, builds, logging and cloud-scale performance
⬢ Evaluate frameworks, tooling, and ecosystems beyond defaults to match modern constraints
⬢ Integrate AI, observability and automation pragmatically without sacrificing maintainability
☕ JVM Corner
⚙️ Java News Roundup: Spring gRPC, Quarkus, Gatherers4j, Keycloak, Grails, Java Operator SDK
A snapshot of recent maintenance and point releases across the Java ecosystem.
⬢ Track incremental but important framework updates
🚀 What’s New in Maven 4
A long-awaited Maven RC focused on performance, extensibility and clearer semantics.
⬢ Improve build performance and dependency resolution
⬢ Modernize project models for future tooling
🧵 I Fixed My Kotlin Logging With One Ktor Plugin
A practical solution for coroutine-safe logging with automatic MDC enrichment.
⬢ Simplify structured logging in asynchronous Kotlin services
🔥 Java Warmup and the Scaling Loop Problem
An analysis of how JVM warmup interacts badly with cloud auto-scaling — and how to fix it.
⬢ Identify startup CPU spikes as a scaling trigger
⬢ Apply mitigation strategies to reduce cost and instability
🧠 Dev Guide: How to Choose Your LLM Without Ruining Your Java Code (2026 Edition)
A pragmatic look at maintainability and security when integrating LLMs into Java systems.
⬢ Prioritize security and maintainability over novelty
🧩 Functional Optics for Modern Java — Part 1
Explores how functional optics address Java’s immutability challenges with nested data.
⬢ Bridge the gap between pattern matching and mutation
⬢ Adopt functional techniques for safer data updates
⚡ Run Into the New Year with Java’s Ahead-of-Time Cache Optimizations
A guide to leveraging AOT cache features for faster startup and peak performance.
⬢ Reduce startup time with AOT caching
⬢ Improve performance predictability in production
🍃 Spring Updates
🧪 FastAPI vs Spring Boot: I Tested Both for 6 Months in Production
A production-based comparison focused on startup time, memory and operational trade-offs.
⬢ Compare real-world performance characteristics
⬢ Choose frameworks based on constraints, not trends
🕸️ Istio Spring Boot Library Released
Introduces a library that generates Istio resources from Spring Boot annotations.
⬢ Automate Istio resource generation
⬢ Accelerate local and cluster-based development
📉 If You’re Still Using Only Spring Boot, You’re Falling Behind in 2025
A survey of emerging Java frameworks addressing modern architectural problems.
⬢ Expand beyond a single-framework mindset
⬢ Match frameworks to specific system needs
🔍 Extra Reads
Observability & Reliability
🧩 Logging sucks. And here’s how to make it better. — Argues for wide events as a more effective observability model.
🧪 Flaky Tests: a journey to beat them all — Explains root causes of flaky tests and mitigation strategies.
Architecture & Decision-Making
🏗️ Options appraisal: a pragmatic guide for architecture decisions — A structured approach to making and owning architectural choices.
🧠 Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail — Reflects on influence, timing and intervention in engineering orgs.
AI, Tooling & the Industry
🤖 Microsoft Share Update on TypeScript 7 — Details the Go-based rewrite of the TypeScript compiler.
🧠 My first two months using AI — A personal account of adopting AI in daily work.
📈 The Next Two Years of Software Engineering — An industry-level view on AI, hiring and productivity shifts.
Culture, Platforms & Open Source
🌍 From Cloudflare Zero-trust to Tailscale — A practical migration story around zero-trust networking.
⚠️ How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem — A critique of centralization risks in open source.
📄 How Markdown took over the world — A history of how a simple format became universal.
Engineering Practice & Teams
🚫 No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams — Minimal management in very early startups.
🔥 I Hate Github Actions with Passion — A critical take on CI ergonomics and developer experience.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.