[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #46 — One Stack to Rule Them All
From “just use Postgres” to modern JVM ergonomics and the agentic future of software
🎯 Featured Article
🏠 It’s 2026, Just Use Postgres
Postgres is framed as a single, multi-purpose home rather than a sprawl of specialized systems, covering search, vectors, queues and time-series under one roof.
⬢ Unify data workloads instead of fragmenting infrastructure
⬢ Leverage Postgres extensions to replace whole classes of other databases
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Consolidate stacks around fewer, more capable primitives (Postgres, modern Java, Spring Boot)
⬢ Embrace JVM evolution in language features, error handling and tooling
⬢ Reconsider productivity narratives in the age of agents and automation
⬢ Acknowledge organizational and ecosystem risks beyond pure code
☕ JVM Corner
📰 Java News Roundup: Jakarta EE 12, Spring Shell, Open Liberty, Quarkus, Tomcat, JHipster, Gradle
A snapshot of recent JVM ecosystem releases and roadmap updates across major frameworks and tools.
⬢ Note steady maintenance across Quarkus, Tomcat, Gradle and Spring Shell
🧩 Java — Feedback on Checked Exceptions and Lambdas
A reflective follow-up on how checked exceptions interact with modern Java idioms.
⬢ Reevaluate exception design trade-offs in functional-style Java
🧱 10 Modern Java Features Senior Developers Use to Write 50% Less Code
A tour of post-Java-17 features that reduce boilerplate and cognitive overhead.
⬢ Adopt records, pattern matching and sealed types
⬢ Reduce reliance on external code-generation tools
🧬 Java Explores Carrier Classes to Extend Data-Oriented Programming Beyond Records
Project Amber proposes carrier classes and interfaces as a more flexible evolution of records.
⬢ Generalize record-like benefits without rigid constraints
⬢ Advance Java’s data-oriented programming model
🍃 Spring Updates
🧰 10 Spring Boot Plugins & Libraries You Need in 2026
A overview of tools shaping Spring Boot development this year.
⬢ Standardize common cross-cutting concerns
⬢ Accelerate production readiness
📨 Testing Emails with Testcontainers and Mailpit
A practical approach to reliable, isolated email testing in CI and local environments.
⬢ Improve confidence in integration tests
🚀 Speed Up Your Spring Boot App Startup by 33% With No Code Change
Using Paketo Buildpacks with CDS and AOT to reduce startup times.
⬢ Optimize containerized Spring Boot apps
⬢ Enable faster cold starts without refactoring
📡 Spring Kafka Finally Made Sense After I Stopped Following Official Tutorials
A pragmatic, project-driven introduction to Kafka with Spring Boot.
⬢ Focus on production-oriented patterns
🔍 Extra Reads
Databases & Distributed Systems
🕒 Clock Synchronization Is a Nightmare — Explains why time is one of the hardest problems in distributed systems.
🧠 MongoDB Introduces Embedding and Reranking API on Atlas — Integrates AI search capabilities directly into the database layer.
Tooling, IDEs & Developer Experience
🪟 Wayland by Default in 2026.1 EAP — IntelliJ-based IDEs move to native Wayland support on Linux.
📦 How to Publish to Maven Central Easily with Mill — Simplifies artifact publishing for JVM projects.
Careers, Process & Agent Era
🧩 The Most Important Code Is the Code No One Owns — Highlights risks of orphaned dependencies in the supply chain.
🤖 Introducing Claude Opus 4.6 — Details a new large-context, agent-oriented model.
🤖 Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex — Announces an advanced agentic coding model.
🧠 I Miss Thinking Hard — Reflects on deep thinking in an era of constant acceleration.
👀 I Tried OpenAI’s New Codex Agent. Here Are My First Impressions — Early hands-on impressions of Codex in practice.
🔙 Software Engineering Is Back — Argues for a return to fundamentals amid agent hype.
⏱ You Can Code Only 4 Hours per Day. Here’s Why. — Connects cognitive limits with sustainable productivity.
💬 Coding Assistants Are Solving the Wrong Problem — Advocates for tools that foster better discussions, not just faster code.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.