[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #45 — Smaller Artifacts, Smarter Systems
From ultra-lean containers to modern JVM tooling, all about efficiency across the stack.
🎯 Featured Article
🧊 I Cut My Docker Image by 99.7% (846MB to 2.5MB). Here Is the Full Breakdown
A practical walkthrough showing how image minimization improves performance, security and costs in real-world deployments.
⬢ Demonstrate how multi-stage builds and static linking radically shrink container size
⬢ Explain why smaller images compound benefits at scale across CI/CD and production
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Reduce operational overhead with leaner containers and artifacts
⬢ Adopt modern JVM and Kotlin tooling for deployment and performance gains
⬢ Leverage Spring and IDE advances to simplify debugging and data access
⬢ Balance agentic coding with design discipline and operational thinking
☕ JVM Corner
🖥️ From a JAR to a full-fledged MacOS app
A practical look at packaging JVM desktop apps for macOS and handling platform-specific quirks.
⬢ Identify filesystem and permission pitfalls on macOS
🗞️ Java News Roundup: Oracle Critical Patch Update, Grizzly 5, Payara Platform, GraalVM, Liberica JDK
A broad snapshot of the Java ecosystem, from security updates to runtime and framework releases.
⬢ Highlight upcoming JDK features like post-quantum TLS support
🚀 Java 26: what’s new?
An overview of Java 26 now that it’s feature-complete.
⬢ Outline the limited but focused set of new JEPs
🧮 Building a High-Performance Rotating Bloom Filter in Java
A systems-oriented exploration of probabilistic data structures in Java.
⬢ Explain how rotating windows bound memory usage
⬢ Maintain predictable false-positive rates in unbounded streams
🧵 What Every Java Developer Should Know About Thread Pools
A clear primer on ExecutorService and concurrency fundamentals.
⬢ Clarify common thread pool types and use cases
🧪 JUnit — Documentation improvements
Long-overdue usability upgrades to JUnit’s docs and version navigation.
⬢ Enable clearer warnings for outdated documentation
⬢ Improve discoverability across JUnit versions
🍃 Spring Updates
🛰️ Spring Boot Debugging — Now Remote
Spring Debugger adds remote debugging to better inspect running applications.
⬢ Expose runtime behavior in remote environments
🧠 Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 4): Subagent Orchestration
An architectural pattern for scaling agent-based systems with focused context windows.
⬢ Delegate tasks to specialized subagents
⬢ Preserve performance by reducing context overload
🗄️ Spring Data JDBC Made Easy with IntelliJ IDEA
First-class IDE support brings JDBC workflows closer to the JPA experience.
⬢ Generate entities and migrations directly from schemas
⬢ Align object models with database-first development
🤖 Anthropic Agent Skills Support in Spring AI
Integrating Anthropic’s Native Skills API into Spring AI applications.
⬢ Combine cloud-based skills with Spring AI abstractions
🔍 Extra Reads
Databases & Performance
⚡ Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations — Creative, non-obvious techniques for speeding up Postgres queries.
🗑️ The challenges of soft delete — Alternatives to the classic archived_at pattern and their trade-offs.
AI & Developer Tooling
🧩 Codex Is Now Integrated Into JetBrains IDEs — OpenAI Codex joins JetBrains’ in-IDE AI tooling.
📉 The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding — Managing debt when relying on AI to write code.
🔍 Assessing internal quality while coding with an agent — A hands-on look at code quality with agent assistance.
Engineering Practice & Careers
🧱 Software Design Principles That Matter — A practical tour of core design principles.
📊 Real Work vs. Imaginary Work — Distinguishing real progress from busywork.
🧮 How I estimate work as a staff software engineer — Why estimation is a polite fiction.
🔧 The future of software engineering is SRE — Operational excellence as a core engineering skill.
Other Ecosystems
🌱 Some notes on starting to use Django — Impressions of a mature, “boring” web framework.
📈 Node.js 16 to 25 Performance Benchmarks — How Node performance has evolved across major versions.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.