The fundamentals of JVM performance, distributed systems and engineering discipline remain critical.
🎯 Featured Article
🤖 AI Coding Agents: Adoption Trends JetBrains’ 2026 developer survey shows AI coding agents becoming a mainstream part of professional development workflows, with 90% of respondents using them weekly.
- 68% of professional developers report using coding agents daily.
- Adoption spans both local agents and remote cloud-based agents.
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
- AI coding agents are becoming routine tools in professional development.
- Java 27 approaches release while JDK 28 advances Valhalla features.
- Spring AI improves RAG through hybrid retrieval and reranking.
- Systems engineering still demands careful tradeoffs, verification and debugging.
☕ JVM Corner
🧩 Value Classes Still Need Compiler Sympathy JEP 401 brings value classes to JDK 28 preview, but their performance depends heavily on how the JVM represents and optimizes them.
- Flattened and reference representations can have different performance costs.
- Interactions between representations can force conversions.
🔎 Java’s String.indexOf can be slow (quadratic) Java’s String.indexOf can exhibit quadratic behavior in unfavorable cases, highlighting the importance of understanding implementation details.
- Naive substring search can require quadratic comparisons.
- Algorithmic behavior matters even for familiar standard-library methods.
📦 JDK 27 and JDK 28: What We Know So Far JDK 27 has reached its first release candidate, while JDK 28 continues development with new preview features.
- JDK 27 is scheduled for release on September 15, 2026.
- JDK 28 includes major progress on Project Valhalla.
🧵 Project Loom in IntelliJ IDEA: Virtual Threads, Scoped Values, and Structured Concurrency IntelliJ IDEA provides tooling and guidance for modern Java concurrency with virtual threads, scoped values, and structured concurrency.
- Structured concurrency helps organize cancellation and error propagation.
- IDE support can make advanced concurrency APIs easier to adopt.
🍃 Spring Updates
🔀 Spring AI Recipe: Better RAG Results with Hybrid Search Hybrid search combines semantic vector retrieval with lexical matching to improve the relevance of Spring AI RAG applications.
- Vector search captures semantic meaning and intent.
- Lexical search preserves exact terms and identifiers.
🎛️ Spring Boot on a 512 MB VPS: How Lightweight Monitoring Still Fits A constrained VPS experiment shows Spring Boot can coexist with lightweight monitoring under 512 MB RAM plus swap.
- A 256 MB environment was insufficient for the application.
- StatLite remained around 12 MiB RSS during the successful run.
🧮 Spring AI Recipe: Better RAG Results with Reranking Reranking adds a second relevance step to RAG pipelines, helping select better documents before constructing the prompt.
- Initial retrieval produces a broader candidate document set.
- Reranking prioritizes documents most relevant to the query.
🔍 Extra Reads
AI-Assisted Development
💬 Make Claude Code sufferable with this one easy trick — Using Simplified Technical English as a memory instruction makes agent output more predictable.
🧭 Working With AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding — Effective AI collaboration puts greater emphasis on context, clarity and feedback.
🪶 Small Models Have Arrived — Smaller models can provide fast, capable coding and research workflows at substantially lower inference cost.
🔄 Quick impressions: A week of using Codex more than Claude — A practical comparison of a week spent using Codex TUI more heavily than Claude Code TUI.
Distributed Systems & Platforms
🐇 RabbitMQ vs. Apache Kafka® — RabbitMQ and Kafka now overlap more as messaging and event-streaming capabilities converge.
🏗️ Platform Engineering ROI: What it costs to build your own platform — Building an internal developer platform can carry substantial ongoing costs that affect the buy-versus-build decision.
💳 The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6 — Cassandra’s path from atomic batches to Accord brings stronger transactional guarantees across partitions.
Engineering Discipline
🛠️ How To Report A Bug So It Actually Gets Fixed — Effective bug reports depend on clear reproduction steps, debugging evidence and precise problem descriptions.
🔐 A Cautionary Tale About Data Breach Claims, Verification and Carhartt — Reported breach claims require independent verification rather than relying on attackers’ assertions.
🔍 Find Git Commits by Commit Message Text — Git revisions can be located directly using parts of their commit messages.
🧘 You should never be angry at work — Maintaining composure at work can improve decision-making and collaboration across different engineering environments.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.