DZone.com Feed

UX Research in Agile Product Development: Making AI Workflows Work for People (Mon, 12 Jan 2026)
During my eight years working in agile product development, I have watched sprints move quickly while real understanding of user problems lagged. Backlogs fill with paraphrased feedback. Interview notes sit in shared folders collecting dust. Teams make decisions based on partial memories of what users actually said. Even when the code is clean, those habits slow delivery and make it harder to build software that genuinely helps people. AI is becoming part of the everyday toolkit for developers and UX researchers alike. As stated in an analysis by McKinsey, UX research with AI can improve both speed (by 57%) and quality (by 79%) when teams redesign their product development lifecycles around it, unlocking more user value.
>> Read More

Kotlin Code Style: Best Practices for Former Java Developers (Mon, 12 Jan 2026)
Many Kotlin codebases are written by developers with a Java background. The syntax is Kotlin, but the mindset is often still Java, resulting in what can be called "Java with a Kotlin accent." This style compiles and runs, but it misses the core advantages of Kotlin: conciseness, expressiveness, and safety. Common symptoms include:
>> Read More

Apache Spark 4.0: What’s New for Data Engineers and ML Developers (Mon, 12 Jan 2026)
Undoubtedly one of the most anticipated updates in the world of big-data engines, the release of Apache Spark 4.0 is a big step in the right direction. According to the release notes, this shift involved closing more than 5,100 sprint tickets, facilitated by the negligence of over 390 active contributors. Machine learning and data engineering professionals, the new features of SQL, additional capabilities for Python, management of streaming states, and the newly introduced Spark Connect framework in Spark 4.0 will further reinforce the trend of high-performance, easy-to-use, scalable data analytics.
>> Read More

The Night We Split the Brain: A Telling of Control & Data Planes for Cloud Microservices (Mon, 12 Jan 2026)
You know those pages you receive in the middle of the night? Not a full-blown fire, mind you, but rather a slow-burning panic? Let me tell you one of those stories that changed the way my team built software forever. It was 2 a.m., and the graphs looked bad. Not dead, mind you, but sick. Our microservices were still talking, but P95 latencies were rising high in the sky, like a lazy balloon. And retries were starting to cascade. The whole system felt like it was in a swamp.  So what was the problem? A “safe” configuration change to our API gateway, a new rate limit, and slight change of routing. It turned out that this change and a previous deploy of an unrelated service that occurred at least an hour earlier had collided in some silent serpentine handshake. The result was a slow, luscious, and irresistible drain on performance. 
>> Read More

DevOps Cafe Podcast

DevOps Cafe Ep 79 - Guests: Joseph Jacks and Ben Kehoe (Mon, 13 Aug 2018)
Triggered by Google Next 2018, John and Damon chat with Joseph Jacks (stealth startup) and Ben Kehoe (iRobot) about their public disagreements — and agreements — about Kubernetes and Serverless. 
>> Read More

DevOps Cafe Ep 78 - Guest: J. Paul Reed (Mon, 23 Jul 2018)
John and Damon chat with J.Paul Reed (Release Engineering Approaches) about the field of Systems Safety and Human Factors that studies why accidents happen and how to minimize the occurrence and impact. Show notes at http://devopscafe.org
>> Read More

DevOps Cafe Ep. 77 - Damon interviews John (Wed, 20 Jun 2018)
A new season of DevOps Cafe is here. The topic of this episode is "DevSecOps." Damon interviews John about what this term means, why it matters now, and the overall state of security.  Show notes at http://devopscafe.org
>> Read More