Alin-Ion Achim

JetBrains just announced they're moving to a single, unified IntelliJ distribution starting with version 2025.3. No more choosing between Community and Ultimate - it's one IDE with features unlocked by subscription. Why does this matter? • Some previously paid features (Spring support, database tools) are becoming FREE • The open-source commitment remains, but with a twist • This signals bigger changes in how dev tools compete in the AI era I spent time analyzing the announcement and its implications. This isn't just about IntelliJ - it's about the future of IDEs in a world where AI assistants are changing how we write code. Full analysis here → https://lnkd.in/gBpSNWUu Curious: How many of you are using IntelliJ Community Edition today? What's your take on this change?

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Waiting half an hour for your tests to finish? That’s not feedback - that’s punishment 🧪 You might have been there: Every new integration test adds another minute to your overall build time. Twenty minutes turn to thirty. CI times explode. Developers stop writing integration tests and become unhappy. Flaky tests appear. Bugs slip through. Releases slow down. But what if you could slash that time, without deleting a single test? With Spring Test, that's possible. It's a hidden gem called Spring TestContext Context Caching 🏆 So, how do you know how many contexts are spinning up? More importantly, how do you figure out why they aren’t being reused? That’s why I built Spring Test Profiler ⏱️ Meet Spring Test Profiler - the free, open-source x-ray for your test suite. Integration is as simple as this three-step process: 1. Add the dependency (Maven/Gradle snippets appear on screen). 2. Run your tests. 3. Open the report at: target/spring-test-profiler/report.html. Within the report, you’ll see: • How many contexts started, and why. • Which tests are sharing configs versus starting their own. • Exact diffs: profiles, properties, or annotations blocking cache reuse. The overall goal is to help identify cache misses and align your tests to reuse contexts for faster feedback 🚤 Spring Test Profiler: Profile. Optimize. Deliver. Try it yourself: https://lnkd.in/djXVJiNE Below is a demo of a section in the report to analyze and compare two contexts 🆚

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🚨 More than 70% of frontend devs struggles with this follow-up question in interview about PWAs? When asked: “How does offline access work in a PWA?” Most confidently say: “Because of Service Workers!” ✅ Correct… but do you know 👇 💡 “What’s the difference between Service Workers and Web Workers?” This is where many candidates struggle but not anymore Here’s the breakdown you should never forget: ⚡ Web Workers 1️⃣ Run JS in a separate thread → avoid blocking the UI. 2️⃣ Die when the page closes. 3️⃣ Best for CPU-heavy tasks (e.g. image processing, data crunching). 🌐 Service Workers 1️⃣ Act as a proxy between your app & the network. 2️⃣ Can intercept requests, cache responses, & serve content offline. 3️⃣ Live beyond page lifecycle → even when the app is closed. 4️⃣ Backbone of offline PWAs, push notifications, & background sync. 🚀 Key takeaway: Web Workers = Performance Service Workers = Offline + Background capabilities 📌 Have you ever faced this question in your system design interview? #Frontend #Interview #frontendinterview #PWA #SystemDesign #WebWorkers #ServiceWorkers #javascript #reactjs #frontendgeek

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A common mistake I see: People treat message queues and streams as if they’re interchangeable. They’re not. Here’s the difference 👇 Message Queue (MQ) - Designed for delivery guarantees (at-least-once, exactly-once). - Great for sporadic workloads and asynchronous tasks. - Messages are consumed and removed. Once acknowledged, they’re gone. - Think: order processing, background jobs, retry logic. Stream - Designed for real-time, high-throughput, continuous data. - Data is append-only and replayable. - Multiple consumers can read the same stream independently. - Think: real-time analytics dashboards, fraud detection, monitoring pipelines. Why Streams fit Aaron’s case (real-time analytics for e-commerce): - Freshness matters → Streams process events as they arrive, with low latency. - Replayability matters → If a consumer goes down, it can re-read from the offset. - Scale matters → Streams partition data for massive parallel consumption. A message queue here would introduce unnecessary latency and discard historical events that analytics needs to stay accurate. Rule of thumb: - If you care about delivery → Message Queue. - If you care about freshness & scale → Stream. That’s why the right answer here is: Streams for real-time analytics.

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Software Architecture Documentation Good architecture is as much about communication as it is about code. A well-documented architecture bridges the gap between vision and implementation, aligning teams and ensuring longevity for your systems. Software architecture docs are the blueprint for understanding, talking about, and changing a system’s design. It helps teams work together better by keeping track of important decisions and details. Good docs make it easier to scale, debug, and improve the system, plus everyone understands what’s going on. Keep your docs short, useful, and organized (like using ADRs, RFCs, etc.). Think of them as code—always updating. Here are a few ways of writing and managing one: 1️⃣ Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) Every choice in architecture has consequences—technical, operational, and cultural. ADRs provide a lightweight, structured way to document why decisions were made, the trade-offs considered, and the context at the time. They’re invaluable for future teams to understand the why behind the how. 2️⃣ Request for Comments (RFCs) Collaboration is key for a sound architecture. RFCs enable open dialogue by inviting feedback on proposed changes before implementation. They create a culture of shared ownership, making the architecture a living, evolving entity rather than a rigid blueprint. 3️⃣ Event Storming When designing complex systems, especially those using event-driven architectures, event storming helps. By focusing on business events, you uncover hidden domain knowledge, identify bottlenecks, and align stakeholders—technical and non-technical alike. 4️⃣ The C4 Model Clarity is king. The C4 model—Context, Containers, Components, and Code—provides a zoom-in/zoom-out approach to documentation that scales with your audience. Whether you’re talking to a developer or a CEO, the C4 model ensures they see what they need to see. To summarize Architecture documentation is significantly more than mere paperwork; it serves as the crucial bedrock upon which resilient, scalable, reliable and maintainable systems are built and sustained. The proper execution of this process will significantly enhance your team’s ability to work at an accelerated pace, all while ensuring the maintenance of high standards and minimizing the potential for errors. What are your go-to techniques for documenting architecture? #SoftwareArchitecture #Documentation #ADRs #RFCs #EventStorming #C4Model

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A Director of Engineering for a 100-person team told me their biggest bottleneck isn't CI/CD or code review. It's the staging environment. Director: "We have one staging environment. At any given time, 3-4 teams are trying to push their changes in for testing. It's constantly breaking, and we spend hours trying to figure out whose change caused the issue." Me: "So it's a race to merge, followed by a blame game?" Director: "Exactly. Devs get frustrated. QA gets blocked. We either delay releases or ship things with less confidence because we couldn't get a clean testing window." This is a classic scaling problem. The old model of a single, shared, long-lived staging environment creates a zero-sum game. The new model? Give every developer a personal, ephemeral "sandbox" for their feature within the shared environment. Instead of fighting for control of the environment, smart request routing isolates each developer's changes. Dev A can test their PR without ever being affected by Dev B's work, even though they share the same underlying infrastructure. The results we're seeing are profound: - Testing contention: Eliminated. - Environment-related release delays: Down 90%+. - Time spent debugging "who broke staging": Near zero. The Director’s follow-up was telling: "You mean my teams can test in parallel without stepping on each other's toes?" Yes. That’s the power of modern development infrastructure. How does your team manage the staging environment bottleneck? I'm keen to hear your strategies. #PlatformEngineering #StagingEnvironment #DeveloperExperience #CICD #Microservices #EngineeringLeadership #DevOps #Testing

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From Developer to CEO Part 03: 5 to 10 years of experience Congratulations, you’re now a senior developer. But you’re not a senior just because you’ve reached 5 years of experience. You’re a senior because you’ve seen more problems— and you know how to prevent them. At this stage, you should be able to build software from A to Z. But your main focus must now shift to business impact. Not just how to code, but how to solve real business problems. Code shouldn’t be your challenge. Code should be your tool—to deliver value. For that, start asking the right questions: • What’s the real problem the customer is trying to solve? • Why does the client need this feature? • What’s the expected benefit for their business? • Is there a better solution? You’re not just a developer anymore. You should become a technical partner to your clients, not just someone who takes orders. Your new mindset: 👉 How can I maximize my customer’s success? If you follow these tips, you’ll level up faster. ⸻ After 20+ years in web development, I’m sharing what I wish I had known when I was younger. This post is a follow-up to Julien Rajerison’s post. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about developers with 10+ years of experience. ⸻ You’ve got this. I’m Toky RABESON. I’m a seasoned web developer.

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Anthropic has taken many of the core concepts of Claude Flow and integrated them directly into its new Claude Agent SDK. In my Flow platform, I had to build orchestration around features like artifact tracking, retries, and context persistence because the SDK didn’t provide them. Now those same ideas are native. Tool governance, artifact durability, and context checkpoints are primitives in the SDK. For example, in Claude Flow I wrote custom routines to retry failed tool calls with exponential backoff. The SDK now includes built-in retry handling. I built artifact management so outputs could be stored, versioned, and reused. The SDK now provides artifact durability out of the box. I had to wire in checkpoints to let an agent recover from mid-flow errors. The SDK now exposes context checkpoints directly. This validates the Flow approach. Structured cycles weren’t a workaround, they were the correct abstraction. Developers can now spin up long-running agents without bolting on any orchestration. The friction is lower, the foundation is stronger. At the same time, Anthropic is absorbing practices we pioneered back into its stack. Not that they have given any acknowledgement. Subagents? That was literally our term. The good news is this makes agents easier for newcomers to build, but it also sets tighter boundaries on how Claude agents are expected to work.

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I am sharing my perspectives on things to avoid in software architecture design reviews. As someone who’s spent years in the trenches of software architecture, I’ve learned that what you don’t do is just as important as what you do. Here are key pitfalls to steer clear of: ✅ Over-indexing on perfection Architecture is about trade-offs. Seeking the “perfect” design can stall progress and demoralize teams. Focus on what’s fit for purpose. ✅ Ignoring context A design that works for one team or product may not scale or align with another. Always ask: What constraints, goals, and timelines shape this solution? ✅ Dominating the conversation Senior engineers should guide, not dictate. Create space for younger voices and diverse perspectives—they often surface blind spots. ✅ Skipping the “why” Reviewing what was built without understanding why it was built that way misses the point. Ask about the rationale behind decisions. ✅ Neglecting non-functional requirements Scalability, security, observability, and maintainability aren’t optional. They’re foundational. Don’t let them be an afterthought. ✅ Focusing only on the tech Architecture is as much about people and processes as it is about systems. Consider team maturity, deployment models, and operational realities. ✅ Failing to document outcomes A review without clear takeaways is a missed opportunity. Capture decisions, action items, and follow-ups for accountability and learning. Great architecture reviews are collaborative, contextual, and constructive. Let’s raise the bar—by knowing what to avoid. #SoftwareArchitecture #EngineeringLeadership #DesignReview #TechStrategy #SeniorEngineerInsights

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