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Software Architecture: After Infatuation Comes the Shock

June 29, 2026

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Development Practice September 21, 2023

Java 21 is GA!

Hi, Java 21 has finally reached General Availability (GA) status since Tuesday 🎉 For months, I’ve taken every opportunity to talk about how virtual threads are the highlight of this release for me. For instance, in this or this old newsletter. And that hasn’t changed. I believe virtual threads are one of the most significant improvements in years. Whether everything turns out as expected remains to be seen. But of course, there are also other features that shouldn’t go unmentioned.

Marcus Held

Development Practice September 13, 2023

Spring Events: Decouple Your Application with @EventListener and ApplicationEvents

Discover how to leverage the powerful event-handling system of the Spring Framework. This article guides you on configuring events using the @EventListener approach and how they can be combined with transactions and asynchronicity. Uncover how Spring Boot utilizes events, create your own events, and see how they can efficiently decouple your modules.

Marcus Held

Development Practice September 11, 2023

Snowflake Connection Provider

Hi, What do snowflakes have to do with software development? Strange question, I know. But I had to ask myself this recently. I was going through the code. I wanted to understand which connection pools we have and how they are configured. That’s when I stumbled upon a connection pool named SnowflakeConnectionProviders. Huh? What is that supposed to be? And how is it used? And why is it a HashMap<String, IConnectionProvider>?

Marcus Held

Development Practice September 7, 2023

Super Boring Topic

Hi, Yesterday, I published an article about the Assert class from Spring. And in May, at the Developer Meetup in Essen , I also talked about the class. But actually, it’s super boring. For those who don’t know: It offers a series of simple “assert” methods. For example, instead of if (someVariable == null) { throw new IllegalArgumentException("someVariable must not be null"); } we can write: Assert.isNotNull(someVariable, "someVariable must not be null"); Incredible.

Marcus Held

Development Practice September 4, 2023

Outch 😵

Hi, Change hurts. The sentence is somewhat jaded. But it became clear to me again a few weeks ago. Toni, an external DevOps Engineer (shoutout to you 😉), was new to the team. On his website he writes, “As an expert in Developer Experience, my goal is to create an ecosystem for high-performance & innovatively-acting development teams.” And he lives it. There is also more than enough to do. And we want to tackle it!

Marcus Held