The MM Software Engineer’s Insights #14 — June 30th, 2025
Your weekly dose of tech, tools, and career wisdom.
This week, we’re exploring the AI and law, offering perspectives on career growth and negotiation, and diving deep into the Java ecosystem with new tools and historical retrospectives.
AI & The Future
- Harper: Free, Open Source Grammar Checker: “Harper checks your writing fast, without compromising your privacy.”
- Writing documentation for AI: “Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems like Kapa rely on your documentation to provide accurate, helpful information.”
- Gemini CLI: “Your open-source AI agent.”
- A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books without authors’ permission: “The ruling isn’t a guarantee for how similar cases will proceed, but it lays the foundations for a precedent that would side with tech companies over creatives.”
Career & Professional Growth
- How to negotiate your salary package: “The complete guide to salary negotiation for engineers and other professionals who think negotiating is morally questionable.”
- Career advice, or something like it: “If I could offer you a single piece of career advice, it’s this: avoid negativity echo chambers.”
- Why Engineers Hate Their Managers (And What to Do About It): “Discover why engineers hate managers, the common management anti-patterns that destroy trust, and practical solutions from someone who’s been on both sides.”
- CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated online job boards, file for bankruptcy: “CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated the online recruitment industry, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday and said it plans to sell its businesses.”
The Java Ecosystem
- Kotlin adoption inside ING, five years later: “Five years after its introduction Kotlin adoption inside ING keeps growing year after year, with a current adoption rate of just over 11%.”
- Carrot Cache: “High-Performance, SSD-Friendly Caching Library for Java”
- History of Java: “Evolution, legal battles with Microsoft, Mars exploration, Spring, Gradle and Maven, IDEA and Eclipse”
- Demystifying Spring Boot With Spring Debugger: “Pull back the curtain on the Spring Boot magic and see how the Spring Debugger plugin makes the invisible visible.”
- Clean and Modular Java: “A Hexagonal Architecture Approach.”
Tools & System Design
- PNG is back!: “After 20 years, PNG is back with renewed vigor! A new PNG spec was just released.”
- Starship: “Starship is the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell! Shows the information you need, while staying sleek and minimal. Quick installation available for Bash, Fish, ZSH, Ion, Tcsh, Elvish, Nu, Xonsh, Cmd, and PowerShell.”
- -2000 Lines Of Code: “In early 1982, the Lisa software team tracked individual engineer progress by requiring weekly code line count submissions.”
- Everything I know about good system design: “I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…”
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.