InfoQ expands its online certification portfolio with new AI Engineering and Organizational Architecture cohorts, giving senior practitioners a confidential peer group to pressure-test production AI, platform, team design, and architecture decisions.

This article explores Kafka's transition toward a cloud-native architecture, examining how tiered storage, FinOps telemetry, elastic consumer scaling, virtual clusters, and Share Groups reshape the operational and economic model of event streaming platforms. It also analyzes emerging diskless-storage proposals and their architectural trade-offs.

The call to action “to make 2026 the year of Java in the terminal” was quickly responded to by the launch of TamboUI. Inspired by Ratatui, the library used in Claude CLI, it promises support ranging from low-level terminal drawing to high-level APIs such as components and event handling. Currently at version 0.3.0, it has already been adopted by major projects such as Maven and Spring.

This week's Java roundup for May 18th, 2026, features news highlighting: GA releases of WildFly 40, Micronaut 5.0, Maven Embedded GlassFish Plugin 8.0 and Apache Fory 1.0; the May 2026 edition of Open Liberty; point releases of Gatherers4j, Apache and Kafka; and the seventh milestone release of Spring AI 2.0.

Schema proliferation builds slowly and gets expensive fast. One schema per event type feels right until there are ten tables, union queries spanning all of them, and a single field rename touching every schema. Discriminator-based schema consolidation collapses that to two tables, turning multi-table unions into a single query, while new variants are additive and don't break existing consumers.

Gunnar Morling, technologist at Confluent and Java Champion, shares his experiences with building high-performance applications in Java, especially in the data space. He shares insights from experiments with building durable execution engines, bootstrapping, and AI natively developing Apache Hardwood - a minimal dependencies Java parser for Apache Parquet.

There was a flurry of activity in the OpenJDK ecosystem during the week of May 18th, 2026, highlighting three JEPs elevated from Proposed to Target to Targeted and three JEPs elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 27. The proposed release schedule has also been finalized.

GitHub has launched Copilot CLI into general availability, bringing generative AI directly to the terminal. Integrated with the GitHub CLI, it offers natural language command suggestions and code explanations. Recent updates introduce "agentic" workflows with Autopilot mode and GPT-5.4 support, alongside new enterprise telemetry for tracking usage across development teams.

The Etsy engineering team recently described how the company migrated its long-running MySQL sharding infrastructure to Vitess. The transition moved shard routing from Etsy’s internal systems to Vitess using vindexes, enabling capabilities such as resharding data and sharding previously unsharded tables.

Amir Langer discusses the evolution of latency reduction, from the Pony Express to modern hardware. He explains how separation of concerns - decoupling business logic from I/O - and tools like Aeron and the Disruptor achieve single-digit microsecond speeds. He shares insights into replicated state machines, consensus protocols like Raft, and the future of low-latency sequencer architectures.

Cloudflare recently announced the preview of EmDash, a new open-source CMS it describes as a “spiritual successor to WordPress.” Designed to rebuild the CMS model around a serverless, developer-focused architecture, EmDash includes AI-native features, developer tooling, and migration paths from WordPress, sparking debate across the WordPress and broader CMS community.

Uber has decentralized its Hive data warehouse, migrating 16,000 datasets totaling over 10 petabytes using pointer-based federation. The migration ensures zero downtime, strict ACL enforcement, improved governance, and scalable, domain-specific datasets for analytics and machine learning workloads.

In this article, the author explores how hierarchical agentic RAG systems coordinate specialized workers through structured orchestration to improve accuracy, reliability, and explainability in complex enterprise analytics workflows. The article uses Protocol-H as a to show how deterministic routing, reflective retry, and modality-aware reasoning support safer multi-source query execution.

Designed to manage concurrent agents running in containers across local and remote compute, Scion is an experimental orchestration testbed that enables developers to run groups of specialized agents with isolated identities, credentials, and shared workspaces.

Pinterest Engineering cut Apache Spark out-of-memory failures by 96% using improved observability, configuration tuning, and automatic memory retries. Staged rollout, dashboards, and proactive memory adjustments stabilized data pipelines, reduced manual intervention, and lowered operational overhead across tens of thousands of daily jobs.

In this episode, Thomas Betts and Adi Polak talk about the need for context engineering when interacting with LLMs and designing agentic systems. Prompt engineering techniques work with a stateless approach, while context engineering allows AI systems to be stateful.

A 600-run benchmark by Ruby committer Yusuke Endoh tested Claude Code across 13 languages, implementing a simplified Git. Ruby, Python, and JavaScript were the fastest and cheapest, at $0.36- $0.39 per run. Statistically typed languages cost 1.4-2.6x more. Adding type checkers to dynamic languages imposed 1.6-3.2x slowdowns. Full dataset available on GitHub.

This week's Java roundup for March 30th, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA release of TornadoVM 4.0 and Google ADK for Java 1.0; first release candidates of Grails and Gradle; maintenance releases of Micronaut, Apache Tomcart and Apache Log4j; and an update on Jakarta EE 12.

Anthropic introduces a three-agent harness separating planning, generation, and evaluation to improve long-running autonomous AI workflows for frontend and full-stack development. Industry commentary highlights structured approaches, iterative evaluation, and practical methods to maintain coherence and quality over multi-hour AI coding sessions.

Andrew Harmel-Law and a panel of expert architects discuss the shifting practice of architecture in 2025. They explain strategies for communicating technical debt to stakeholders, the benefits of decentralized decision-making through ADRs, and the career paths of modern leaders. The panel shares insights on bridging the gap between mobile and backend teams to ensure a holistic system.