At the very beginning of last year, I decided to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung. Haven't missed a review since.

Here we go…

1. Spring and Java

A quick followup to the survey Brian Goetz ran to take the pulse of the community on the best way to implement type inference in Java. Looks like a pretty decisive yes.

Jing looks like a clean, nice way to access your SQL data – here's just a quick example to show you what the library can do.

Very quick and to the point way to run your tests in a more predictable order – which makes a lot of sense.

I personally actually like the unpredictable nature of tests – it's a quick and nice way to flush out any unforeseen connections between them – but I can certainly see the appeal of running them in a clear order.

A very practical and useful guide to using stored procedures with Hibernate. A bit annotation-heavy, but if you're using JPA, you're already used to that.

Also worth reading:

Webinars and presentations:

Time to upgrade:

2. Technical

Having a solid understanding of CSRF attacks well beyond the basics – can save your bacon when taking your system to production. Definitely have a look at this one.

I enjoy reading through the details of these attacks. I'm saving this one for the weekend but it looks promising, so I'm including it here as well.

API documentation is the new hotness, yes, but it's also necessary. And while I'm using Swagger myself, I'm keeping a close eye on the other tools available out there.

A very quick and to the point set of questions to ask yourself before deciding if Event Sourcing makes sense for the architecture of your system.

Also worth reading:

3. Musings

Removing “dead” code is critical to keep the sanity of your system (and your own while you work on that system).

One of the cleanest and easiest to work with codebases that I ever touched early on in my career – was one where the team lead was ruthless with cutting code that wasn't used immediately.

Passion is one thing, and allowing it to put you in unhealthy, one-side type of work is another.

This piece is definitely worth the read, especially if you're relatively new to working as a developer.

Some solid advice if there ever was any – think through those little, day to day decisions to keep your system and your codebase clean and nimble.

If you ever asked the monitoring question for the system you're working on, you've asked yourself this exact question more than once.

My only gripe about this one is that it doesn't include the other major player in the space – New Relic. Other than that – some solid information over here.

Also worth reading:

4. Comics

And my favorite Dilberts of the week:

5. Pick of the Week

Every year I run a survey to find out how the adoption of new technologies is going. Here are the new numbers for Spring and Spring Boot: