Learning MongoDB
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Part 1
Learning MongoDB, one document at a time
Part one of a series: a Spring Boot 4 playground, the embed-vs-reference call that replaces schema normalization, and the Decimal128 default that would have quietly corrupted every price I stored.
15 Jul 2026
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6 min read
·125 views
Spring and Java mechanics
Aggregate Roots in Spring Data JDBC: The Delete-Boundary Rule
Spring Data JDBC takes DDD aggregates literally. Here's a one-question rule for drawing aggregate boundaries — and how to avoid N+1 once you have them, verified against the real generated SQL.
5 Jul 2026
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6 min read
·162 views
Shipping an AI feature into my own product
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Part 1
Ask Zakaria: I bolted a grounded AI chat onto my CV site
Why my career site now answers questions out loud — the graceful-degradation bean, the SSE streaming, the atomic quota race, and the discoverability bug that had nothing to do with code.
2 Jul 2026
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5 min read
·129 views
Spring and Java mechanics
Spring Batch 6, Hands-On: A New Engine, a Real Operator, and Stops That Cross JVMs
A code-forward tour of Spring Batch 6 on Spring Boot 4 and Java 25 — the resourceless repository, the new ChunkOrientedStep engine, Spring Framework 7 retry, the CommandLineJobOperator, and how stop and recover actually work under the hood.
28 Jun 2026
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9 min read
·297 views
The Model Context Protocol, hands on
Building an MCP Tool with Spring Boot AI
How I turned Apache Kafka into a set of tools an AI client can call — using Spring AI's MCP server, a handful of @Tool methods, and one ugly-but-necessary servlet filter.
28 Jun 2026
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5 min read
·178 views
Spring and Java mechanics
Flyway on Spring Boot 4 and Java 25: a silent failure, and what it taught me about modular auto-config
Wiring Flyway into a Spring Boot 4.1 / Java 25 app with a Docker-Compose Postgres - including the Boot 4 auto-config modularization gotcha that makes a missing starter look exactly like a missing library.
28 Jun 2026
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6 min read
·823 views
Traces, Tempo and the LGTM stack
Manual tracing in Spring Boot with OpenTelemetry: @WithSpan, hand-built spans, and the traps in between
Wiring OpenTelemetry into Spring Boot 4 — the annotation way and the manual Tracer way — plus the context model that ties them together and the gotchas that cost me time (a silent @WithSpan, http/protobuf vs gRPC, and Docker's 'is a directory').
23 Jun 2026
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6 min read
·544 views
Spring and Java mechanics
Spring MVC Won't Throw ConstraintViolationException (Here's What It Throws Instead)
Three validation mechanisms wear one annotation vocabulary in Spring MVC. Only one hands you a ConstraintViolationException — the rest give you Spring's own web exceptions. Here's the map, with live proof.
14 Jun 2026
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5 min read
·267 views