The even more unbelievable crime fact (which I learned relatively recently) is that burglary has fallen by more than 90% since the 1990s. Did anyone notice? Nope. Does anyone believe it? Nope. But is is true? It is!

It's absolutely astonishing: In just about 13 years, Norway has skyrocketed from virtually no sales of zero-emission battery electric vehicles to nearly 100% of all new passenger car purchases.

*Lots* of goodness ⬇️ www.infoq.com/podcasts/neu... "Context switching is going to impair your decision-making. So maybe don't make any big business-critical decisions if you have nine hours of meetings back-to-back because you're going to probably do a suboptimal choice making in that context"

It's a common myth that dogs are meat-eaters. Based on observation of my puppy, their favourite food is rose bushes.

I want as many developers as possible to experience the joy of refactoring their code when they have a good test suite by their side. It's infectious. You'd want that feeling all the time.

Zombie applications are a big problem, but zombie libraries are bad too. Not sorting out CI and update automation leaves apps vulnerable to security vulnerabilities, but it also leaves them vulnerable to bad, expensive, planet-hurting,performance: thenewstack.io/outdated-pyt...

Past me submitted an abstract for Devoxx promising six labour-intensive demos, including this, totally sensible, demo: “Benchmark an application against a grapefruit, because metric units aren’t tasty”. Abstract got accepted. Current me is NOT IMPRESSED with past me.

🎙️ On today’s #GOTOpodcast, @trishagee.bsky.social & @charleshumble.bsky.social unpack Professional Skills for Software Engineers: • Why “soft skills” aren’t soft • Communication that drives products • Networking that opens doors 🎧 gotopia.tech/podcast

I’ve always wondered why electric cars don’t have solar panels on the roof, for charging on the move. Mercedes have gone one better, and invented solar-panel-paint. (For a broad definition of “paint”, but still, how cool is that??) www.automotiveworld.com/articles/mer...

Sheep are like private clouds

It's another double win. If you install solar panels on land sheep are currently grazing, not only can the sheep continue to graze there, they're actually *happier* (because of the shade and more diverse vegetation), and they produce more wool. Hmm, is that actually a triple win?

Explore the JVM track 👉 oredev.org/line-up?tags... From AI on the edge to lightning-fast runtimes 🪐 @adambien.blog 🪐 Adam Tornhill 🪐 @askowronski.bsky.social 🪐 @chrmelchior.bsky.social 🪐 @hansolo.eu 🪐 @coduinix.bsky.social 🪐 @hollycummins.com ns.com 🪐 James Ward 🪐 @starbuxman.joshlong.com

"In retrospect my recommendation was based too heavily on superficial traits, and not enough on opposable thumbs." I'm dying over here. 🤣

🎙️#GOTOpodcast: @hollycummins.com & @ogkittylyst.bsky.social dig into Optimizing Cloud Native Java: ⚡ Why performance tuning is as much psychology as tech 📊 How to measure what matters 🧵 Virtual threads & Java’s concurrency future Listen: gotopia.tech/podcast

LLMs have perfected the art of being confidently wrong, but they didn't invent it. For 13 years, Merriam-Webster included the word "dord". Never heard of a dord? It's not a thing. Why was "dord" in a dictionary? A chemist told Merriam-Webster researchers "D or d" were synonyms for "density". 🤦

Snake-in-the-Box Problem xkcd.com/3125/

Oh but it's beautiful.

Wheeee! 🇧🇪

Confession time. When I get the InfoQ weekly newsletter, I read through to see if I'm in it. I was just telling myself how silly I was for doing such a vain, futile, thing, and ... there I was, in the newsletter. (Each newsletter has a *lot* of links so it's not surprising I'm sometimes included.)

Oh rats, I just spotted, a month too late, that I had the wrong QR code for my London Java Quarkus slides. Um, if anyone wants the demo code and slides, they're actually here: hollycummins.com/langchain4j-...

New laptop misery. My IDE is causing all sorts of formatting chaos, because some formatting settings didn't migrate. I do not wish to think about formatting, hand-revert formatting churn, or fuss with IDE formatting settings. *Why* have the ecosystems (apart from Go) not sorted this out by now? 😭

@sannegrinovero.bsky.social‬'s career wisdom: make yourself replaceable, interview regularly, and truly listen. These aren't just tech lead tips - they're growth principles. When you enable others to succeed without you, you create space for bigger challenges. techleadjournal.dev/episodes/220/

Here’s an opportunity to work with some fantastic engineers!

Guardrail messages:" A Noodle is not a SNAKE". I can't argue with that. Good job I've got guardrails.

Me too, me too!

The cloud moves fast, which is a gift, but without guardrails, it turns into sprawl - resources pile up without owners - security decisions drift - costs surge Most organizations have the tools - what they're missing is the system that brings it all together

The wisdom of @hollycummins.com

Just submitted for #DevoxxBe, two whole weeks ahead of the deadline. I have to hope my family don't see the proposal, or it will be one of those awkward "Holly, why do you always do this kind of demo to yourself?" conversations at home. 😅

You know how modern LLMs use flattery to keep you engaged? I promise I actually did have a reason to ask ChatGPT about my drawing style that wasn't vanity, but I'm now basking in the warm glow of synthetic obsequiousness. ("The machine likes my drawings! It really does!")

I love one-character typos that are mostly undetectable but completely reverse the meaning. The classic is "now" instead of "not". I just collected a new one: "This undermines the need for ..." vs "This underlines the need for ..."

Catching up on my reading/watch list and I came across this interesting talk from @hollycummins.com, in which she breaks down the critical importance of efficient computing – I think more developers should care about this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5MF...

The ELUSIVE ART of User-Focused Simplicity In Software Platform Design | Holly Cummins 📽️ AVAILABLE NOW Watch here ➡️ youtu.be/IiShnllocNM

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Agent2Agent (A2A) Java SDK, contributed by the WildFly and the Quarkus communities. Get ore details in Stefano Maestri's blog post. quarkus.io/blog/a2a-pro...

This is a very interesting post from Kate that goes into a lot of specific complaints from developers about the AI code review tools. The hallucinations and false positives seem like they would be a huge pain, and as we know, false positives can lead people to not take real problems seriously.

@hollycummins.com 's discussion in the Engineering Culture podcast about developer productivity reminds me a lot of Cal Newport's notion of "seudo productivity" vs "slow productivity" in his newest book (buff.ly/VBBEZBi) Btw, give the podcast episode a listen, it's great:

I enjoyed chatting to @cdetastes.bsky.social on #QuarkusInsights. It was a good "story of an extension," complete with origin, killer feature, and maybe-future enhancements. Main reason for writing the extension: be able to inject beans into JavaFX domain objects. www.youtube.com/live/yP-8wXj...

I'd forgotten about the Quarkus Sofa Metaphor until I rewatched this snippet of my talk.

More podcastage: www.k8spodcast.nl/afleveringen... #k8s #zombies #sustainability

In this #InfoQ #podcast, @hollycummins.com discusses how "messing around & having fun" boosts problem-solving in #SoftwareEngineering! She dives into the big shift from just coding to managing code with #AI and tackling cognitive overload. 🎧 Listen now: bit.ly/4edqwka #DevEx #Productivity

Tukey xkcd.com/3104/

I think I could have a lot of fun with this demo. :)

I saw this talk elsewhere and +1 recommend, even if you don't use genomic matching algorithms in your work (in fairness, not many of us do 😬). Lots of great insights into performance optimisation, choosing sensible approximations, and working with people in other disciplines.

I'm super happy that I can share that the FREE FULL VERSION of Quarkus in Action continues to be available until January 16, 2026!!! Download and share! developers.redhat.com/e-books/quar... Thanks to Red Hat developer!!!

This was a lot of fun 😊

“You’ve all heard of rubber ducking? Where you get stuck so you try explaining the problem to the rubber duck on your desk? Well, now we’ve got Copilot, the duck talks back!” - quote of the week from @jayharris.com’s session at DevSum.

I enjoyed listening to Gaël Duez and bsky.app/profile/eric..., debriefing Erica's #QCon track: podcast.greenio.tech/https://podc... It was interesting to hear the track host's thinking about how she shaped the track, and what she took away afterwards.

A cartoon from my next book. Physics for Cats will be out in the autumn from @dandq.bsky.social and @canongate.co.uk with other languages coming soon.

19 new extensions last month. And I wrote the page that lists them. 😎

Can confirm, Google AI snippets reports that the world's most annoying time zone is a thing

Some top tips here. (Side note: I too have violated all of these recommendations. 😅)