Backend1 min read
Versioning REST APIs in Spring Boot
APIs evolve, but clients don't upgrade in lockstep. A clear versioning strategy lets you change contracts without breaking existing consumers.
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Engineering notes on software & systems
Deep dives on frontend architecture, backend systems, databases, and the day-to-day craft of building software — with real code you can copy.
Backend1 min read
Database Migrations with Flyway in Spring Boot
Schema changes need to be versioned, repeatable, and applied in order. Flyway makes your database schema part of your codebase.
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Resilient Service Calls with Resilience4j
Downstream services fail. Circuit breakers, retries, and timeouts keep those failures from cascading through your system.
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Caching Strategies: Cache-Aside, Write-Through, and Write-Behind
Caching is easy to add and easy to get wrong. Understanding the three core patterns helps you pick the right consistency trade-off.
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Building Idempotent REST Endpoints
Clients retry. Networks drop responses. An idempotency key lets a repeated request produce the same result exactly once.
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Getting Started with the OpenAI CLI
Set up the OpenAI command-line tools, authenticate securely, and confirm everything works before you write a single line of application code.
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Tuning the HikariCP Connection Pool
The connection pool is often the real bottleneck under load. Here's how HikariCP works and how to size it sensibly.
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Your First OpenAI CLI Requests
With the CLI set up, let's make real calls — a chat completion, a streamed response, and a scripted prompt you can pipe into other tools.
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Async Messaging with RabbitMQ and Spring
When you need routing, work queues, and acknowledgements more than a replayable log, RabbitMQ fits. Here's the Spring AMQP essentials.
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Setting Up the Claude Code CLI
Claude Code brings Anthropic's models into your terminal as an agentic coding assistant. Here's how to install, authenticate, and configure it.
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Stream Processing with Kafka Streams
Kafka Streams turns topics into continuously updating computations. Here's how to aggregate and transform events without a separate cluster.
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Working with Claude Code: A Practical Example
Setup done, let's use Claude Code for real — asking questions about a codebase, making a scoped change, and running it non-interactively in a script.
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Event-Driven Design with Spring Application Events
Before reaching for Kafka, Spring's in-process application events can decouple your components cleanly. Here's when and how to use them.
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Getting Started with the Gemini CLI
Google's Gemini CLI is an open-source terminal agent with a generous free tier. Here's how to install it, sign in, and pick a model.
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Gemini CLI in Action: Example Workflows
With the Gemini CLI set up, here are three real workflows — exploring a repo, generating code with a scoped prompt, and piping it into scripts.
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Rate Limiting Spring APIs with Redis
A shared counter in Redis lets every instance enforce the same request budget. Here's a fixed-window limiter you can drop into a filter.
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Distributed Locking with Redis
When multiple instances race for the same resource, you need a lock they all respect. Redis provides a simple, fast distributed lock primitive.
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Calling REST APIs with Spring's RestClient
Spring's RestClient offers a modern, fluent, synchronous HTTP client to replace RestTemplate. Here's how to call external services cleanly.
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Bean Validation in Spring Boot
Validation belongs at the edge of your system. Jakarta Bean Validation lets you declare rules on your DTOs and enforce them automatically.
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Pagination and Sorting in Spring Data
Returning entire tables over HTTP is a scaling trap. Spring Data's Pageable makes paging and sorting a one-parameter change.
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Understanding @Transactional in Spring
Declarative transactions are convenient until they surprise you. Here's how propagation, rollback rules, and proxying actually work.
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Observability with Spring Boot Actuator
You can't operate what you can't see. Actuator exposes health, metrics, and runtime internals through production-ready endpoints with minimal setup.
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Kafka Producers and Consumers in Spring Boot
Kafka decouples services through durable, replayable event logs. Spring for Apache Kafka makes producing and consuming records almost trivial.
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Redis Caching in Spring Boot
Once you run more than one instance, an in-memory cache stops being enough. Redis gives you a shared, distributed cache that every node can read and write.
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Understanding React Server Components
A practical mental model for React Server Components — what runs where, why it matters, and how to avoid the most common pitfalls.
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Database Caching with the Spring Cache Abstraction
Repeated database reads are the easiest performance win to claw back. Spring's cache abstraction lets you add caching declaratively without touching query code.
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Background Workers with Spring @Async and @Scheduled
Offload slow work and run recurring jobs without blocking request threads. Here's how to use Spring's async and scheduling support correctly.
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Building REST APIs with Spring Boot
Spring Boot removes most of the ceremony from building REST services. Here's how to structure controllers, DTOs, and error handling cleanly.
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VS Code Extensions Worth Installing
The extension marketplace is enormous and mostly noise. Here's a focused set that earns its place, plus how to share them with your team.
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Automating Work with VS Code Tasks
Stop retyping the same build and test commands. VS Code tasks let you define, chain, and bind them to keystrokes.
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Debugging in VS Code
console.log gets you far, but a real debugger gets you further. Here's how to set up breakpoints, watches, and launch configs in VS Code.
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Dependency Injection in Spring Explained
Constructor injection, beans, and scopes — a practical tour of how Spring's IoC container wires your application together.
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VS Code Shortcuts That Save Hours
The difference between a slow and a fast editor session is rarely typing speed — it's navigation. Here are the keybindings worth committing to muscle memory.
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Remote Development in VS Code
Edit code that lives on a server, in a container, or in WSL as if it were local. VS Code's remote extensions make the environment gap disappear.
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Live Templates in IntelliJ IDEA
Type a short abbreviation, hit Tab, and expand it into a full code snippet. Live templates eliminate the boilerplate you write over and over.
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Spring Data JPA Without the Surprises
Repositories, derived queries, and the N+1 problem. How to use Spring Data JPA productively without hidden performance traps.
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Refactoring with IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ's refactorings are safe, scope-aware, and reversible. Leaning on them instead of manual edits prevents a whole class of mistakes.
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Debugging Java in IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ's debugger goes far beyond breakpoints — evaluate expressions, drop frames, and change values live. Here's how to use it well.
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IntelliJ IDEA Shortcuts Every Java Dev Should Know
IntelliJ rewards keyboard fluency more than almost any other IDE. These shortcuts turn navigation and refactoring into reflexes.
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Securing Spring Boot APIs with JWT
A practical walkthrough of stateless authentication in Spring Security using JSON Web Tokens and a custom filter.
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Spring Boot Development in IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ Ultimate understands Spring deeply — bean graphs, endpoint mapping, and configuration hints included. Here's how to lean on it.
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Mastering the Java Streams API
Map, filter, reduce, and collect — how to write expressive, readable data pipelines with Java Streams and avoid common pitfalls.
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Rate Limiting with a Token Bucket
The token bucket algorithm is the workhorse of API rate limiting. Here's how it works and how to implement one in Go and TypeScript.
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Tuning Kafka Producer Throughput
A default producer sends one record at a time and leaves throughput on the table. Batching, compression, and acks tuning can multiply your write rate.
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Spring Boot Configuration and Profiles
Externalized config, type-safe properties, and environment profiles — how to manage settings across dev, staging, and production.
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Testing Spring Boot Applications
Unit tests, slice tests, and full integration tests with Testcontainers. Build a testing pyramid that stays fast and reliable.
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Kafka Connect for Data Pipelines
Writing bespoke producers to sync a database into Kafka is wasted effort. Kafka Connect gives you declarative, fault-tolerant source and sink connectors.
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Reactive Programming with Spring WebFlux
When to reach for WebFlux, how Mono and Flux work, and the rules you must follow to keep a reactive pipeline non-blocking.
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Modern Java: Records and Pattern Matching
Records, sealed types, and pattern matching for switch turn verbose Java into concise, expressive code. Here's how they fit together.
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Deploying Spring Boot with Docker
Layered images, multi-stage builds, and JVM tuning for containers. Ship small, fast-starting Spring Boot images to production.
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Kafka Schema Registry with Avro
Unstructured JSON on a topic becomes a liability as producers and consumers evolve. A schema registry enforces compatibility so upgrades never break.
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Postgres Indexes That Actually Help
Indexes can turn a 3-second query into a 3-millisecond one — or do nothing at all. A field guide to picking the right index in Postgres.
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Exactly-Once Semantics in Kafka
At-least-once delivery means duplicates. Kafka's idempotent producer and transactions let you achieve exactly-once processing when you truly need it.
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Kafka Consumer Groups Explained
Consumer groups are how Kafka scales reads. Partitions are divided among group members, and rebalancing keeps the work balanced as members come and go.
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Debouncing and Throttling in Practice
Two techniques that look similar but solve different problems. When to reach for each, with copy-paste TypeScript implementations.
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Kafka Fundamentals: Topics, Partitions, and Offsets
Everything in Kafka builds on three ideas. Understand topics, partitions, and offsets and the rest of the system suddenly makes sense.
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Date and Time with java.time
The old Date and Calendar classes were mutable and error-prone. The java.time API models instants, dates, and zones cleanly and immutably.
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Serialization in Java Done Right
Java's built-in serialization is a security and compatibility minefield. Prefer explicit formats like JSON and treat native serialization with caution.
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Garbage Collection Tuning Basics
Most apps never need GC tuning, but when latency spikes appear, knowing which collector you run and how to read its logs is essential.
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Java IO vs NIO
Classic streams are simple and blocking; NIO adds channels, buffers, and non-blocking I/O. Knowing when to use each keeps your file and network code efficient.
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Text Blocks and Modern String Methods
Escaping quotes and concatenating multi-line strings is a thing of the past. Text blocks and new String methods make Java text handling pleasant.
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Sealed Classes in Java
Sealed types let you close a hierarchy to a known set of subclasses, giving the compiler enough information to check your switch statements exhaustively.
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Java Collections: Choosing the Right One
ArrayList or LinkedList? HashMap or TreeMap? The right choice depends on your access pattern, and the wrong one shows up as latency.
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Functional Interfaces and Lambdas
Lambdas are more than syntax sugar. Knowing the core functional interfaces lets you design clean, composable APIs.
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The Java Memory Model Explained
Why does a value written by one thread sometimes stay invisible to another? The memory model defines the rules, and volatile is often the fix.
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Immutable Objects in Java
Mutable shared state is the root of most concurrency bugs. Immutable objects are automatically thread-safe and far easier to reason about.
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Java Generics: A Deep Dive
Wildcards, bounds, and type erasure trip up even experienced developers. Understanding the rules makes your APIs both safe and flexible.
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Working with Optional in Java
Optional was meant to end the null-check ritual, but misused it just moves the problem. Here is how to use it the way it was designed.
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Exception Handling Best Practices in Java
Swallowed exceptions and generic catch blocks hide the bugs that matter. A few disciplines keep failures visible and actionable.
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Virtual Threads in Java 21
Platform threads are expensive, so we pool them. Virtual threads are cheap enough that you can spawn millions and write plain blocking code again.
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Concurrency with CompletableFuture
Callbacks nest, threads block, and orchestration gets messy fast. CompletableFuture lets you compose async work into readable pipelines.
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