In this post, Alex Zhitnitsky takes a down-to-earth view at the frameworks we have at our disposal, focusing on the Java ecosystem, to actually implement microservices and see what they’re all about.

In this post, we’re looking back on 5 of the topics and new developments that shaped our conversations in 2015.

There’s a legend out there saying that every time someone mentions Project Jigsaw, it’s delayed by one month. Alex Zhitnitsky takes a brief look at Project Jigsaw’s history of delays in the wake of recent news about the Java 9 launch being pushed back.

There has been a lot of talk about the speed of streams in Java 8, but as Alex Zhitnitsky shows, sticking to a more traditional Java programming style with iterators and for-each loops will significantly outperform new implementations in Java 8.

We’ve served up some Java conundrums in the past, but now its time to get your head around these Scala brainteasers. Alex Zhitnitsky is back in collaboration with the team from Scala Puzzlers to test and torment your Scala know-how. Prepare thyself!

Slack is fast becoming the default messaging service and developers can really benefit from the new workflows that Slack is enabling. Alex Zhitnitsky takes us through the integrations that allows users to customise the service to their own specific developer tools.

Alex Zhitnitsky looks at the creation of meaningful benchmarks with the Java Microbenchmarking Harness – a powerful component of the OpenJDK code tools project that has been used extensively during Java 9 development.

Assembling a time-critical response to errors is important in the context of keeping your application in check. Distributed logging and testing in production all form part of the solution for Alex Zhitnitsky. We must address vulnerabilities quicker.

Like testing yourself? Alex Zhitnitsky has a great set of Java puzzles to baffle even the most die-hard Java coders. Explore the more unusual side of Java with this quiz, but be warned: They’re not meant to be used in real-life Java applications!

It’s really easy to misrepresent data, so its important to keep your performance percentiles in check. Alex Zhitnitsky shows us the Java performance metrics you need to follow for understanding how your application behaves in production.

Considering a change in your architecture? If you’re looking at Apache Spark, it might be worth seeing what Alex Zhitnitsky has to say about the top 5 things you should consider before the jump. Software architecture is hard.

Takipi’s Java Deathmatch proved to be challenging and fun. Alex Zhitnitsky has collected the stats from over 20,000 participating developers and shares a selection of the results. One question in particular got the better of the majority of participants.

Alex Zhitnitsky shares some of the caveats of deploying and managing the ELK stack on your own, and introduces us to the world of hosted ElasticSearch to help solve problems of scalability, stability and maintenance.

First it was Java libraries, now Alex Zhitnitsky gets his paws into researching the top Scala libraries from 64,562 dependencies – quite the mammoth task! Read on to reap the rewards of this impressive Scala research.