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

I’ve been following the progress of this book for a while, and it’s clear that it’s going to be THE reference material for developers aiming to learn Hibernate and JPA for many years to come.

It’s cool that it’s finally almost ready to go out and make some waves.

Very nice, code-heavy look into what’s coming to Java, and specifically how the modularization work is going to play with bean validation.

Java 9 is a-coming, and the improvements to the Stream APIs and general functionality definitely look interesting.

Another interesting, data-driven writeup, this time on the state of the job market.

The guys and gals from Takipi have been on a number crunching rampage lately. My best guess is that they hired someone really good at pulling insights out of data.

A different perspective to the fat jar approach of packaging and deploying applications, which makes a lot of sense at real scale.

A good, quick intro to what the Java EE Guardians group is all about, and of course the general state of the Java EE ecosystem right now.

An interesting take on the concept of self-imposed limitations.

And a personal note here, on learning. I was once forced to not touch my mouse, in a 2-day TDD workshop. It was frustrating, but also a huge boost in learning to get better on the keyboard.

Yep, it’s that time of year. The new Eclipse is out.

Also worth reading:

Webinars and presentations:

Time to upgrade:

2. Technical

Yes, discussing the best way to approach a git workflows can be a black hole.

This writeup though is pretty to the point, and actually offers a concrete opinion, so it’s well worth a read.

Also worth reading:

3. Musings

Intelligent, intentional positioning is rare in our space, which is truly unfortunate. A good read talking about the way to niche down and the benefits that come with such an initially scary prospect.

This is a cool read about the impact of re-designing a product page.

And it has nothing to do with Java (just FYI).

Different points in the serverless discussion.

Even though I’ve not experimented with most of these concepts in practice, this writeup definitely clears things up and starts making the possibilities clearer for when I will.

Also worth reading:

4. Comics

And my favorite Dilberts of the week:

5. Pick of the Week