Claude Code: A Beginner’s Guide That Doesn’t Put You to Sleep

For developers who want an AI in their terminal and still have no idea what CLAUDE.md is. You’ve come to the right place. 🤔 What Even IS Claude Code? Okay so you’ve heard of GitHub Copilot, right? Claude Code is like that, except instead of whispering suggestions into your IDE like a shy intern, it’s a full-blown agentic assistant that lives in your terminal and acts like a senior developer who has had three espressos and is ready to ship. ...

May 27, 2026 · 11 min · Vitalii Sukach

5 Spring Boot Mistakes I See in Every Codebase

And why senior developers keep making them I’ve reviewed a lot of Spring Boot codebases. Startups burning through their runway trying to scale. Enterprises with ten-year-old monoliths being carved into microservices. Teams of three and teams of fifty. Different industries, different sizes, different levels of experience. The mistakes are almost always the same. That’s not an insult — it’s actually the interesting part. These aren’t beginner errors. Most of the teams I work with are smart, experienced engineers who made reasonable decisions under pressure. The problem is that Spring Boot is so productive, so frictionless, that bad patterns compound quietly. You ship fast. The tests pass. Production looks fine. And then six months later you’re staring at a 2,000-line controller and wondering how it got there. ...

May 24, 2026 · 8 min · Vitalii Sukach

SDLC in an Outsourced Company: How the Process Really Works

How distributed teams structure the Software Development Life Cycle — governance models, communication contracts, phase-by-phase responsibilities, and the hidden failure modes that kill outsourced projects before launch. What makes outsourced SDLC different Every software team runs some version of the SDLC — a structured sequence of phases that takes an idea from concept to running code. When delivery is handled by an external vendor, the same phases exist, but the dynamics between them change completely. ...

May 10, 2026 · 11 min · Vitalii Sukach

MVCC - invisible superpower inside every query

Every time two transactions run at the same time in PostgreSQL, something remarkable happens under the hood. Nobody locks the table. Nobody waits. Yet everyone sees a consistent view of the data. This is MVCC — Multi-Version Concurrency Control — and once you understand it, you’ll never look at your database the same way again. What is MVCC? Imagine a library where every book has a version number. When you check out a book to read it, the librarian doesn’t lock it away from everyone else. Instead, they hand you the version that existed at the moment you arrived. If someone else rewrites the book while you’re reading — you still see the original. You’re reading a snapshot in time. ...

May 8, 2026 · 9 min · Vitalii Sukach

Apache Avro without the Confusion

Binary serialization sounds scary until you realize it’s just a very efficient way of saying “I’ll describe the data once, then send only the bytes I need.” Let’s demystify Avro — from raw bytes to Schema Registry to versioning — with real Java code and zero hand-waving. What is Avro, and why should you care? Avro is Apache’s answer to “JSON is too fat and XML makes me cry.” It’s a binary serialization formatthat stores data alongside a schema — a JSON document that describes the structure of your data. Think of it as a very strict contract between producer and consumer. ...

May 1, 2026 · 11 min · Vitalii Sukach

Java Concurrency without the headache

You’ve dealt with threads in production. You’ve seen the race conditions, the deadlocks, the “works on my machine” moments. This is a casual, example-first refresher — not a textbook. What even is a Thread? A thread is the smallest unit of execution. Your JVM always has at least one — the main thread. Every thread has its own call stack, but they share heap memory, which is exactly why concurrency is both powerful and terrifying. ...

April 25, 2026 · 15 min · Vitalii Sukach

When One “Fast” Query Becomes a Production Nightmare: The Dehydration Problem in Hibernate

Developers love the idea of a single, elegant SQL query that fetches everything in one go. One round‑trip to the database. One response. One perfect solution. Except… in Hibernate, that “perfect” query can quietly turn into a CPU‑burning, memory‑eating disaster. This hidden performance trap is known as the dehydration problem — when Hibernate tries to hydrate (map) a multiplied result set into your object graph. The SQL is fast, but the ORM mapping becomes painfully slow. ...

April 17, 2026 · 4 min · Vitalii Sukach

Business Flow as a Part of Technical Documentation: Why Tech Leads Should Own It

Every developer has faced the same painful situation: a huge task from a Business Analyst that doesn’t align with the technical architecture, is full of gaps, or ignores corner cases entirely. Some developers implement only the “happy path.” Others follow the requirements literally, even when the logic becomes unnecessarily complicated. And after implementation, QA finds a long list of bugs — mostly in those forgotten corner cases. Why does this happen? Because the business flow is unclear, incomplete, or not aligned with how the system actually works. ...

April 14, 2026 · 4 min · Vitalii Sukach

From Legacy Chaos to Sustainable Architecture: A Step‑by‑Step Refactoring Strategy

Legacy systems are rarely “just bad code”. Usually, they’re the result of years of rushed decisions, unclear requirements, and survival‑mode delivery. I’ve faced this situation more than once, and developed a practical methodology that lets you improve the system while still shipping features — without a big‑bang rewrite. The three core problems In troubled projects, the same three issues appear again and again: Business logic is complex and undocumented You can’t be sure if a “better” solution is actually correct, because nobody fully understands the current behaviour. The team is under pressure and chooses the easiest path Deadlines dominate. Developers implement quick fixes instead of proper solutions, increasing entropy over time. Domain logic is scattered across the codebase There is no clear separation of concerns. The same domain is implemented in multiple places, in different ways. You can’t fix this with a single refactor. You need a strategy. ...

April 12, 2026 · 5 min · Vitalii Sukach

Polymorphism in Database Design: A Simple Key–Value Approach for Evolving Schemas

Modern systems evolve fast. New features appear, requirements change, and data models grow in unexpected directions. If you’ve ever worked with a “god table” — a huge table with dozens or hundreds of columns — you know how painful schema evolution can be: every new feature requires a migration many columns stay empty for most rows the table becomes harder to maintain the schema no longer reflects real business logic One way to avoid this is to use polymorphism in the database through a key–value (EAV) table. Instead of adding new columns, you store flexible attributes as rows. ...

April 6, 2026 · 4 min · Vitalii Sukach