Broadleaf Commerce gives you a solid kit, but the real fun starts when you stretch it. If you are wrangling promotions, shaping a catalog, or tuning search, this is where the platform pays you back. Peak season just cooled down, teams are eyeing Spring Boot two, and Elasticsearch is in…
Category: General Software
Industry trends, platform evaluations, migration strategies, and systems thinking. The broader context of software development and technology choices.
Organizing Vanilla JS in Large Projects
Vanilla JavaScript can power a serious app. No framework badge required. The trick is the way you shape files, name things, and ship the bundle. This is a field note from projects that crossed the thousand line mark and kept going. The goal is simple: stay readable, stay testable, ship…
EC2 in Practice: Instances as Cattle
\n Context \n\n\n\n A lot of teams are moving fast on AWS EC2, but many still treat servers like long lived pets. You name them, you log in to fix them, you guard them like a favorite old laptop. Then a kernel patch like the recent Spectre and Meltdown mess…
Logs, Metrics, and Healthchecks for Containers
I was on call when a tiny container took down a very loud service. The app worked fine on my laptop. In the cluster it went quiet. No log files on disk, fresh pods spinning, users refreshing. We had CPU to spare yet no clue why requests stalled. That night…
Currencies and Exchange: Modeling Money Safely
Currencies and Exchange: Modeling Money Safely. Java Money from a practitioner point of view with lessons you can keep for a long time. Why talk about money modeling today The pound just whipsawed after the Brexit vote and every pricing page got nervous. Money bugs do not show up in…
CQ5 Components Done Right
CQ5 components are the place where projects either sing or stall. If you are building on Adobe Experience Manager, still called CQ5 by many teams, your components decide the authoring feel, the speed of delivery, and the sanity of your future self. With HTL Sightly getting real adoption and Touch…
Image Size Diet: Slimmer, Faster, Safer
You ship fast until the first pull drags on and your deploy loses steam. Then you stare at a progress bar that feels like dial up while your cluster waits its turn. Image size is not vanity. It touches everything your team does. A big image slows cold starts, burns…
Running Jackrabbit: Repository Tips
Running Apache Jackrabbit should feel boring in the best way. Here are the habits that keep a JCR repository fast, safe, and predictable. Plenty of the buzz is around Oak and fresh releases of content platforms, yet many teams still rely on classic Apache Jackrabbit 2.x for production content stores,…
Interpreting Spikes without Panic
Your traffic chart just went vertical and your heart did the same. Before you ping the team at one in the morning, breathe and open Google Analytics with a plan. Start with the basics that calm the room. Open Real Time and verify that the spike is not already gone,…
Local Development with Compose
I was pairing with a teammate who had a classic starter project checklist on a sticky note. Install this, pin that, flush these ports, pray to the demo gods. Their local MySQL kept fighting with a forgotten background service. After twenty minutes of whack a mole, we wiped the slate,…