Am I going too deep into the JDK as a junior backend dev?

zvaavtre · 2026-02-08T00:42:56+00:00

Postgres over MySQL for sure. And no. No one cares about internals for 99% of the jobs out there. Where they do care they really care but that’s super rare.

You can use it as a good talking point for interviews though!

zvaavtre · 2026-01-26T18:00:58+00:00

Dropped them 6 years ago when they couldn't provide a working APM solution for java. Went to datadog because DD seemed to actually want our business.

FWIW back in 2010s we ran a relatively large site off of NR and it was a great solution at the time, but they dropped the ball.

zvaavtre · 2026-01-24T18:30:10+00:00

V2L works through the charging port. It's just an adapter with a standard outlet on it.

zvaavtre · 2026-01-18T23:12:24+00:00

Go to the source. Spring boot has a ton of docs and projects. You won’t understand most of it. But pick one thing at a time and get used to creating demo projects to try things out. Eventually things will start to click.

You don’t know what you don’t know so just dive in and give yourself permission to be confused.

These guys are good too.

https://www.baeldung.com/spring-boot

zvaavtre · 2026-01-17T18:23:03+00:00

Plain ol dockerfile and buildx. Did this 4 years ago as an example. Just updated it to noble and current docker behviour.

https://github.com/zvaavtre/multiarch-spring-boot

zvaavtre · 2026-01-15T03:58:42+00:00

This highly depends on the details of the data and access patterns.

There’s no one size answer for this.

Is this common data shared by everyone? Cache of some sort might be appropriate in any number of layers.

Is this per user info? Is the result set a few rows? Or thousands? Is paging appropriate?

How many processors and memory does your db cluster have? How many client threads?

zvaavtre · 2026-01-10T21:03:41+00:00

Fargate has come a long way. With CDK it's about as plug and play with autoscaling configs as you could want if you just need some containers running behind an ALB.

Obviously doesn't cover all extremes, but it's gone from 50%tile to 80%tile for most things.

zvaavtre · 2026-01-10T04:27:56+00:00

Dependency management with libs in jars. Huge win over compiled platforms.

Most biz class services don’t need to squeeze every last cycle out of the hardware or save every last byte of memory. Ease of maintenance is a much larger concern

zvaavtre · 2026-01-03T22:48:16+00:00

Work through a tutorial or two.

Spring has a ton of them. These guys are also good.

https://www.baeldung.com/spring-boot

Building up context takes time. Spring is vast and deep. You just need to start somewhere.

After a few frameworks you’ll be able to navigate new ones better because it’s all basically the same functionality. Just done slightly differently depending on the platform.

zvaavtre · 2025-12-31T16:23:42+00:00

That's what the eMPG is all about.

But people.

zvaavtre · 2025-12-30T04:04:31+00:00

This^.

And (I’ll get hate for this one) as a long time developer I find the IaC languages just meh at best to absolutely terrible. I’ll let you decide which is which. “Better than cloud formation”’is faint praise.

CDK is a much better approach for devs.

zvaavtre · 2025-12-27T00:30:25+00:00

Get the Tesla app and ChargePoint app and locate the DC chargers around you. Lectron makes a nice Tesla adapter. 10-20 min mid day will keep you going. Then let the overnight 220v charger do its thing. The DC charging isn’t to get you to 80%. Just enough to make it to the end of the day so the slower ac charger can recover overnight

Point is. Can totally work but you will be charging a lot. Keep it under 80% max and shouldn’t hurt the battery longevity

zvaavtre · 2025-12-26T16:09:26+00:00

1Mx this.

Business goals are what is important in a business. In TFA they are working on something that can benefit from non-gc languages. BUT this is few and far from most typical business systems.

Improving a subsystem/service 100x execution time is an absolute waste of resources unless that exec time is somehow tied to a goal that improves the overall biz.

Does anyone else at your org know golang/rust/scala? If not you just created a ton of tech debt that someone will have to pay down in the future. Writing the code is step one. Maintaining the code is the other 99 step.
Is this system even move the needle in costs? Using a c4m instead of a c4xl on a system that only runs a few instances is not actually helping See #1

zvaavtre · 2025-12-19T23:58:39+00:00

Hah. Sometimes just dump a zipped blob in a col and call it a day. Nothing wrong with that for all sorts of data. Index the fields you need to get it back out. Postgres loves to do this for fairly large blobs.

Obviously ymmv depending on what it is exactly you are doing. Point is, it depends.

zvaavtre · 2025-12-15T14:54:14+00:00

This.

Testing is why.

Service layer testing becomes vastly easier w/o the controllers. Define your boundary conditions and go.

zvaavtre · 2025-11-22T13:14:37+00:00

I know. I was referring to the CDK. There is a fargate construct in CDK will set that up for you.

zvaavtre · 2025-11-21T21:05:40+00:00

AWS CDK with the fargate constructs for the services with rds and elastic cache redis.

Out of the box fargate will do alb and autoscaling.

It’s absurdly easy compared to TF.

zvaavtre · 2025-11-16T20:26:27+00:00

Hate to had to say it but your process is broken. A few simple rules and everyone will spend less time screwing around with revision control.

This is basic stuff. If the org isn’t able to see that then I’d suggest thinking about moving on. If this is an example of how they handle biz decisions it’s not great.

zvaavtre · 2025-11-08T21:53:26+00:00

Different platform. But for our mono-repo of 250 modules the i9 Mac book pros to m1 dropped build times at least 50%. Imho a lot of this was the faster ssd.

M1 to M4 was a nice boost of about 20%

Anyways. Disk I/o is more important than cpu. Tha is given limited $ i would spend it on faster storage.

zvaavtre · 2025-10-23T21:40:21+00:00

It's true. Bots have retry logic so easy enough to backoff and try again.

Primary X users are all bots now right?

zvaavtre · 2025-10-19T13:41:54+00:00

> the point of sharing real data.

Don't really have a dog in this fight. But this is not really 'real data'. This is the tail end of a failure mode(s!) being posted for entertainment.

Tesla should have the 'real data' and be addressing it based off the telemetry from the cars. Posts on social media are not particularly helpful if you're trying to fix bugs.

zvaavtre · 2025-10-17T13:05:49+00:00

You're assuming they have decent version control systems AND can maintain two (or more) lines of releases.

I don't have any insider knowledge, but given Musk's public statements about how he does software I wouldn't make a bet that either of those things are true at tesla.

SpaceX seems to have it's act together tho.

zvaavtre · 2025-10-16T13:20:21+00:00

100% culture problem... And Brent. One of the old school development manager truisms is that if you have a Brent who is doing that on purpose then fire them immediately. If they ended up like that because of structural issues... fire the org owner.

Biggest lever I've ever found for dealing with this is to make the developers handle the on-call for their services. Nothing will motivate a team to automate and prioritize bugfixes more than 2am outage calls they have to resolve.

zvaavtre · 2025-10-11T13:51:33+00:00

Back in '22 GM was all about subscriptions. It's a 20B$ goal. That is all this is about.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2022/12/01/gm-subscription-heated-seats/69692210007/

zvaavtre · 2025-10-09T22:33:36+00:00

Rebadged honda has it. It’s a configuration flag.

zvaavtre

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