This blog post highlights six success stories from my short AI assisted engineering journey.

19 interesting SW development articles which I read during October 2025: www.petrikainulainen.net/monthly/soft... - HIGHLIGHTS: solving the wrong problem, your data their rules, and why we tend to avoid public conversations.

HIGHLIGHTS: Taming backend complexity: lessons from a decade of TDD, What's new in JUnit 6, and 2FA testing with Playwright and Mailosaur.

19 interesting SW development blog posts which I read in September 2025. HIGHLIGHTS: why I am declining your AI generated MR, keeping secrets out of logs, and are the SOLID principles outdated

21 interesting test automation articles which I read during September 2025. Highlights: the Tetris principle, how to optimize your Spring Boot integration tests, and how to write your first performance tests with Grafana k6.

An interesting article which explains why some people cannot pass technical interviews which include a live coding session.

You should always take responsibility for the code you commit.

15 interesting SW development blog posts which I read in August 2025. HIGHLIGHTS: I Know When You Are Vibe Coding, AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning, and Live Coding Sucks.

Why I Fired Google and Gave an AI Chatbot a Shot: www.petrikainulainen.net/software-dev...

HIGHLIGHTS: how to write automated tests for a legacy application that cannot be unit tested, learn to test production-ready Spring Boot applications, and how to write Playwright tests which verify that the expected interactions happen between our UI and REST API.

HIGHLIGHTS: the rules and roles of AI assisted testing, how to create a useful logging config for Spring Boot tests, and learn to write performance tests with Playwright and Lighthouse.

New in my toolkit (after resilience4j and Spring Retry): #failsafe failsafe.dev Nice api, clear docs, easy and flexible to integrate and use. Well done. #java #awesomeEcoSystem

Interesting article.

I will grab Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West from the Steam's summer sale. The price is decent and I guess these (+ Rocket League) will keep me entertained for the rest of this year.

HIGHLIGHTS: a good test name is a sentence, how to write parameterized test classes with JUnit 5, and supercharge your Playwright tests with the Chrome DevTools Protocol.

I use a somewhat similar approach.

I have come to the conclusion that I will monetize my blog. Have you done the same? If yes, what membership plugin / service did you use?

This is an excellent post.

✨ New blog post: "STF Milestone 4: Parameterized test classes" JUnit 5.13 introduced parameterized test classes (in addition to methods). They are a powerful testing tool that has long been missing from JUnit Jupiter... 👉 marcphilipp.de/blog/2025/06...

I think people go through various phases of using AI: 1. AI is just a hype 2. AI seems to be helpful 3. Wow, AI is amazing and it's going to take away our jobs 4. OMG, AI made my codebase a mess 5. Okay, so I need to do the thinking and use AI to carry out the tasks.

I am testing the Jetbrains AI Assistant and I have noticed that I can pass guidelines to AI chat by following these steps: 1) Open the markdown file which contains the guidelines 2) Open AI Chat and allows access to code base 3) Ask the assistant to read guidelines and generate code. Interesting.

Highlights: how to generate good tests with AI, 3 ways to run a Docker container with Testcontainers when we are writing integration tests for Spring Boot applications, and vibe testing with Playwright.

If you want to generate Spring controllers with openapi-generator-maven-plugin and you don't want to include Swagger annotations in the generated code, this comment describes the configuration you have to use: github.com/OpenAPITools...

Good point.

Sometimes vibe-coding is relaxing, and sometimes it's not.

Want to use Junie AI Agent for developing #SpringBoot applications. You should checkout the guidelines repository github.com/JetBrains/ju... You can use "guidelines" files for AI Agents, "guidelines-with-explanations" files for developer understanding. Your contributions are most welcome!

Spring JdbcClient: A better alternative to JdbcTemplate www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF7v... A practical hands-on tutorial on how to use JdbcClient to interact with SQL databases.

I think that I will try Jetbrains AI. I have a personal project which I will start from the scratch and it will be interesting to see if it can write the "boring" code when it has access to the code base.

Expectations vs. Reality

The Efficiency Delusion

I find it a bit funny that Github doesn't want to train AI bots: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4393...

Learn to write unit tests for a #SpringBoot REST API endpoint that returns an object as JSON. This guide identifies the key tests, shows how to eliminate duplicate request building code, and demonstrates how to write the required assertions with MockMvcTester and AssertJ.

When you hear "Database is just an implementation detail"...RUN.

If you always take the easiest path, you won't learn anything.

My employer does pay for SW which I need, but I also pay several licenses from my own pocket. These include tools like Little Snitch, iStat Menus, IntelliJ Idea, ChatGTP, Transmit, Sublime Text, and many others.

I did some thinking and came to the conclusion that I have encountered three systems which I would call legacy code. Two of them were actively developed and used an in-house "framework". No one wanted to touch the third one because they were afraid that it will break.

This is quite easy to do and very helpful.

This blog post explains why these myths were born and argues that these myths aren't a problem IF we use Spring Boot in the correct way.

Interesting article that describes how you can catch WCAG (accessibility) violations with Playwright and generate the a report that displays all found violations.

An excellent blog post which pretty much summarizes my experiences with BDD testing tools. These tools are always sold with a promise that non-technical stakeholders will now write test scenarios, but every time the end result has been the same: developers will write the same test multiple times.

Highlights: why we shouldn't use Gherkin (or other BDD tools), top 5 Spring Boot testing myths debunked, and how to detect WGAC (accessibility) violations with Playwright.

I updated my Spring MVC Test Tutorial page. I added links to my new #MockMvcTester articles.

A Practical Guide to Testing Spring Controllers With MockMvcTester blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2025/04...

I am currently downloading Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. 45 minutes to go.

So, if MS would have kept the original copyright notices, everything would be fine? Another thought: maybe it's a good idea to use a restrictive license if you don't want that mega corporations can fork your project.

The second part of my MockMvcTester tutorial identifies the tests we must write, describes how we can remove duplicate request building code from our test class, and explains how we can write unit tests for a REST API endpoint that returns a list as JSON.

I just happened to buy Core 2 Duo 8400 + Asus P5Q SE2 + 4GB DDR2 combo :D It was so cheap (10€) and tested => I had to pull the trigger.

I got a sudden urge to build a Windows XP computer for playing old games, but then I remembered that I don't have enough time to play all interesting modern games. But, building that damn thing would still be fun.

"devs, perhaps swayed by the convenience of annotations, might overlook thorough domain modeling necessary for maintaining business logic integrity ... while tools like Lombok can significantly reduce boilerplate, they are not substitutes for careful design and a deep understanding of the domain" 👆

An interesting story which describes how (and why) Spring MVC got annotation support.