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Optional is a return type that signals absence explicitly. It's not a null replacement, not a container to store in fields, and not a way to avoid NullPointerException everywhere. Used correctly, it improves API clarity. Used incorrectly, it adds allocation and verbosity without benefit.
Read moreFrameworks, languages, and tools change. The underlying concepts they implement — data modeling, concurrency, network communication, failure handling — do not. Engineers who learn new technology through the lens of fundamentals learn faster and more durably.
Read moreMost microservices monitoring setups track the wrong things: CPU and memory dashboards while missing error rate spikes and latency degradations that users are experiencing right now. Here is what actually matters and how to alert on it.
Read moreAsynchronous messaging solves a class of reliability and decoupling problems that synchronous HTTP calls cannot. Most teams discover this after their first major production incident involving a slow downstream dependency.
Read moreMicroservices trade one class of problem for several others. The architecture is legitimate — but teams routinely adopt it before they have the operational maturity to survive it.
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