Articles

19 articles from Feb 2026 to Sep 2026, 298 minutes of reading. Each one carries its topic and a bar as long as it takes to read. For a whole topic in reading order, start with a field guide.

Each block is one article, as wide as it takes to read. Choose a topic to filter the list.

September 2026

30 Sep 2026

Java memory model: volatile, atomic, synchronized and final, measured

volatile makes each read and each write visible, but it does not make hits++ one step. Three runnable JDK 27 experiments measure what volatile, AtomicInteger, synchronized and final each promise.

11 min

Java and Spring

August 2026

31 Aug 2026

What ralphctl found when it finally measured itself

The first time ralphctl graded itself it drew a line through its own history: unmeasurable before the instrument shipped, fully graded after.

Part 5 of 5 in Building ralphctl

19 min

AI engineering

15 Aug 2026

Search that finds typos, synonyms and exact terms: one Postgres table, one Spring Boot app

Built in plain PostgreSQL 18 first, then driven from Spring Boot 4.1 through the JPA Criteria API, up to the exact line where Criteria runs out and one native query takes over. Runnable repo, 36 tests against real Postgres.

23 min

Data and search

9 Aug 2026

Records, sealed interfaces, and exhaustive switch: one modeling primitive

Records, sealed interfaces, and pattern matching are usually taught as three Java features. Together they form one modeling primitive that turns a fail-open security bug into a compile error.

9 min

Java and Spring

July 2026

26 Jul 2026

Client ID Metadata Documents in Spring: CIMD instead of DCR

Client ID Metadata Documents replace Dynamic Client Registration for MCP clients. How CIMD works in Spring, and what happened when Claude Code connected.

Part 5 of 5 in Spring Boot and OAuth2

24 min

Identity and security

22 Jul 2026

Virtual threads in Spring Boot: where your real limit lives

Spring Boot virtual threads move Tomcat's concurrency gate from 200 to 8192 without telling you. Where your real limit lives, measured, plus the fix.

23 min

Java and Spring

1 Jul 2026

What a ralph loop actually is, and how to run one without burning your tokens

A ralph loop is a coding agent in a while loop. What it is, why it resets context each pass, and how to run one without it spinning forever or costing $200 overnight.

13 min

AI engineering

June 2026

26 Jun 2026

Earning the overnight run: ralphctl from 0.8 to 0.13

Ten releases took ralphctl from 'works in the demo' to a harness I trust overnight: safe migrations, a memory, parallel tasks, and a real budget.

Part 4 of 5 in Building ralphctl

10 min

AI engineering

24 Jun 2026

MCP server OAuth2 in Spring: the DCR proxy pattern

A Spring Authorization Server that adds Dynamic Client Registration in front of an IdP that can't, keeping a Spring AI MCP server connectable to AI clients.

Part 4 of 5 in Spring Boot and OAuth2

23 min

Identity and security

7 Jun 2026

Trusting AI-generated code: the harness, not the model

Trusting AI-generated code you didn't read line by line: trust the harness you built, not the model. AI now assists ~42% of committed code.

8 min

AI engineering

4 Jun 2026

OAuth2-secured RabbitMQ over AMQP 1.0

Secure Spring Boot 4 messaging over RabbitMQ AMQP 1.0 with OAuth2 and the native spring-rabbitmq-client: same Keycloak scopes, simpler in-place token refresh.

Part 3 of 5 in Spring Boot and OAuth2

12 min

Identity and security

2 Jun 2026

OAuth2-secured RabbitMQ over AMQP 0.9.1

Secure your Spring Boot app's messaging with OAuth2, not guest/guest. RabbitMQ joins your HTTP APIs' Spring Security setup as a resource server.

Part 2 of 5 in Spring Boot and OAuth2

19 min

Identity and security

May 2026

28 May 2026

The harness era caught up: ralphctl and the convergence I bet on

When I started ralphctl, 'harness' was a word from one Anthropic post. Now it's the third phase of AI engineering, there's an arXiv paper, and the whole field has standardized on the patterns I built early.

Part 3 of 5 in Building ralphctl

13 min

AI engineering

April 2026

24 Apr 2026

The delivery harness: your agent writes code, but who's shipping it?

Agent harnesses orchestrate code generation. Delivery is a longer pipeline. Here's the mental model I've been using to plug team, tools, context, and models into one value stream, and where the agent harness fits inside it.

14 min

AI engineering

12 Apr 2026

Estimation in the age of AI (or: how many prompts is a delete dialog?)

Story points, t-shirts, fruit salads, and now tokens. A messy, honest look at why estimation was already broken before AI showed up, and what it takes to keep planning sane when the tools move faster than the humans.

19 min

AI engineering

7 Apr 2026

From sprint CLI to agent harness: how ralphctl got an evaluator

Anthropic's first harness article inspired ralphctl. Their second one on generator-evaluator loops pushed me to build an evaluator for v0.2.0, and the tool changed identity.

Part 2 of 5 in Building ralphctl

11 min

AI engineering

March 2026

30 Mar 2026

Token exchange with Spring Cloud Gateway

A hands-on walkthrough of RFC 8693 token exchange using Spring Cloud Gateway, Keycloak, and three frontend frameworks. Architecture, implementation, observability, and the things the docs don't tell you.

Part 1 of 5 in Spring Boot and OAuth2

24 min

Identity and security

6 Mar 2026

Building RalphCTL: a sprint CLI for AI-assisted coding

I built a sprint CLI for Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. The problems I didn't see coming and what it took to make AI-assisted coding feel like a real workflow.

Part 1 of 5 in Building ralphctl

17 min

AI engineering

February 2026

14 Feb 2026

Six years from idea to first post

How a mid-COVID idea, a Mockito article, and years of failed blog frameworks eventually turned into a working developer site built with Next.js.

6 min

Web and writing