A modest app somehow grew Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch and a vector DB — five things to back up, secure and pay for. Most of that is now one Postgres. Here's the queue, vector, search and pub/sub SQL, and the honest signals for when to graduate.
Treating LLM calls as just another upstream dependency. How to use Spring AI to build a multi-provider gateway with retries, circuit breakers, prompt versioning, and observability — the same hygiene you'd put around any external API.
Retrieval-augmented generation has been wrapped in enough mystique to obscure that it's mostly an ETL problem. What the pipeline actually looks like, where the real engineering happens, and the failure modes that have nothing to do with the model.
Stop the thirty-PR CVE fire drill. How to centralize dependency versions across a microservice fleet using a Maven BOM or Gradle version catalog.
How to package global exception handling as a Spring Boot starter for a microservice fleet — RFC 7807 responses, no leaked stack traces, one dependency.
If you wouldn't pour the foundation after the roof, why do we keep building UIs before we know what data lives behind them? A case for designing the schema first — not because backend matters more, but because it's the part that can't be undone.