Introduction Between the 9th and the 10th of October, I had the privilege of participating to the second edition of the Game of Codes conference in Niš, Serbia. Since I couldn’t attend the first edition, I decided to participate, and I’m glad I did that. First of all, having Venkat Subramanian and L...

Thirteen years later! Thirteen years ago today, I created this blog on WordPress.com because I wanted to share some best practices I discovered while developing various web and enterprise applications with both Java and .NET. Prior to LLMs and AI tools, developers relied on Google and StackOverflow ...

Introduction On the 24th of September, I participated in the 9th edition of DevTalks Cluj-Napoca, and since I had a really great time attending this conference, I decided to share what I learned from attending sessions and having conversations with both speakers and participants. DevTalks DevTalks r...

JavaZone 2026 At the beginning of September, I participated in JavaZone for the third time and had the privilege of meeting a lot of passionate software developers willing to share their knowledge with the community. In the first conference day, I attended a very good talk about JPA performance tuni...

Introduction In this article, I’m going to show you how to emulate a LEFT JOIN FETCH between two root entities without fetching the intermediate child entity. I got the inspiration for this article by this comment thread on my blog. Domain Model Let’s assume we have the following entities: The Post ...

Introduction In this article, I’m going to show you the best way to replace the deprecated @GenericGenerator when upgrading your application to Hibernate 7. Hibernate @GenericGenerator annotation The @GenericGenerator annotation has been available since Hibernate 3.5, as an alternative to the <gener...

Introduction My friend, Denis Magda, wrote a wonderful book called Just Use Postgres!, and I’m glad that I got the chance to read it. Audience This book is useful for any software developer who’s either using PostgreSQL or plans on using it because it covers a lot of features that are very useful fo...

Introduction In this article, I’m going to show you the best way to clean up test data when using Spring and Hibernate. While it’s very common to use the @DataJpaTest annotation when implementing integration tests, in this blog post, you will see why you are better off avoiding using this annotation...

Introduction My friend, Laurentiu Spilca, has been working on the second edition of his Troubleshooting Java book, and when I was asked to review it, I was more than happy to do it since the book features a lot of topics that I’m also very interested in, such as performance tuning and query optimiza...

Twelve years later! Twelve years ago today, I decided to create this blog on WordPress.com to share whatever I was finding interesting while working as a software architect. Prior to starting this blog, I didn’t have any writing experience, which you can clearly see in the first article I’ve ever pu...

Introduction In this article, I’m going to show you how to optimize the queries executed by a Spring application running on MySQL using Releem. For a short introduction about Releem, check out this previous article, in which I explained how to set up Releem to collect metrics from your MySQL databas...

Introduction In this article, I’m going to review the Foundations of AI and Machine Learning for Java Developers video course from my fellow Java Champion, Frank Greco. If you are new to AI and ML and want to get a great introduction to these topics, then you should definitely join watch the video l...

Introduction In this article, I’m going to explain how to map the Oracle TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE with JPA and Hibernate. While the DATE and TIMESTAMP column types are suitable for mapping the LocalDateTime, the TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE column type allows us to map both the ZonedDateTime and OffsetD...

Introduction If your application uses MySQL and you’re interested in getting the best out of it via performance tuning and monitoring, then Releem is a very nice tool that can assist you in your endeavor. I discovered Releem from Roman Agabekov’s posts on social media. Roman is the founder of this t...