Actuator isn't the problem. The mistake is adding it to a project with no clear exposure policy. Here I break down which endpoints to enable, which to block, and what decisions to make before the first deploy.
Auth tutorials show you the happy path. The real problems in digital identity show up in revocation, state-change propagation, and the trust model. A decision guide from the inside.
When a digital signature fails, the instinct is to look at cryptography. Most of the time the problem is format or validation policy. Here I separate the three layers so the next error doesn't cost you hours.
Same backend, same database, same k6. In the first runs it looked like Embedded GlassFish was on top. When I fixed JDK, warmup, window, heap, and DB attribution, the story changed: Spring Boot ended up with the best local profile for this workload. Payara Micro was the cleanest Jakarta EE by check failures. GlassFish surprised by being viable.
I built a reproducible lab with Spring Boot 3.5, Java 21, AppCDS, AOT, and GraalVM Native. The conclusion isn't that native wins or that classic JVM loses: it's that in 2026, comparing only startup time is the fastest way to make an architecture decision with incomplete data.
OpenTelemetry doesn't improve performance. It improves diagnostic quality when a slow request mixes DB, downstream, N+1, and partial errors. This reproducible lab shows which signals stay hidden when you only have logs, and what appears when you look at the trace.
I built a reproducible lab to compare Prisma 5 against Spring Boot JdbcTemplate on the same PostgreSQL 16. What I found wasn't a winner: it was that query shape and N+1 explain almost everything, and blaming the ORM is too easy.
A reproducible experiment with Spring Boot 3, Java 21, and k6 to measure when retry actually buys availability and when it amplifies a failure. The metric that matters isn't p95: it's retry_amplification_factor.
A low p95 with a 97% error rate isn't a fast pool — it's a pool that fails fast. I built a reproducible experiment with Spring Boot 3, PostgreSQL, and k6 to understand which signals actually matter — and which ones deceive you.
32 years in the dev trenches. Here I write what I learned, what I broke, and what nobody tells you in the tutorials.
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