The MM Software Engineer’s Insights #6 — May 05th, 2025
Latest happenings and insights for software engineers.
Welcome to our newsletter’s most recent edition, which features a carefully chosen collection of news and thought-provoking articles for software engineers. We cover a variety of topics this week, including the complexities of distributed systems, the constantly changing field of back-end development, useful software engineering techniques, career advancement in the AI era and some genuinely intriguing books from the tech industry.
Distributed Systems & Architecture
- Lessons from building and maintaining distributed systems at scale. : “When your architecture grows beyond a single container, things you thought were simple can now break in a variety of ways.”
- What is Architecture?. : “The term “Architecture” in enterprise IT refers to various activities beyond physical structures. This blog post outlines different architectural flavors and their role in delivering business value.”
- What If We Could Rebuild Kafka From Scratch?. : “Desirable traits for a new cloud-native event log include separating storage and compute, object store support, and other features based on experience with Kafka.”
Back-end Development
- Why Does Spring Use Bubble Sort?. : “You might be surprised to learn that, as of version 6, Spring Framework includes an implementation of Bubble Sort.”
- Spring News Roundup. : “RCs of Spring Boot, Data, Security, Auth, Session, Integration, Web Services”
- Why Every Other Back-end Framework is Trash (Except Spring Boot). : “The article compares Spring Boot to other backend frameworks, arguing that Spring Boot is the only one that actually works.”
- Data Oriented Programming (DOP) in Java. : “What is Data Oriented Programming?”
- Redis is open source again. : “Redis considered switching to the AGPL license due to internal discussions and the SSPL’s lack of community acceptance. The AGPL gained traction within the company.”
Software Engineering Practices
- How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them. : “Error handling is often neglected in user experiences, resulting in frustrating and unhelpful messages. To improve this, error messages should be crafted to help users recover quickly and continue using the product.”
- We Interviewed 100 Eng Teams. : “The Problem With Modern Engineering Isn’t Speed. It’s Chaos.”
Career & Skills
- About building up skills. : “Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI”
- “AI-first” is the new Return To Office. : “The latest trend among tech CEOs is to prioritize AI in all work, which may be suboptimal if employees are skilled.”
Interesting Reads
- How do I cross post Medium articles to GitHub pages powered by Jekyll. : “The author enjoys blogging but prefers a personal website over Medium due to cost and syncing issues.”
- Stripe already has a way for iOS developers to dodge Apple’s payment system. : “The payment platform is adding an option to redirect payments on iOS to the web after Apple’s big antitrust trial loss.”
- You Wouldn’t Download a Hacker News. : “Behold the fraction of total comments and stories referencing key topics over time!”
- Claude can now connect to your world. : “Claude introduces Integrations, a new way to connect apps and tools, and expands Research capabilities with an advanced mode that searches the web, Google Workspace, and Integrations.”
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.