Pretty sure the intended use case is as a return type. I use Optionals in this case quite often. I do find the handling of optional with lambdas weird but appreciate the brevity.

On dependencies: Having had to migrate from struts 1.x and angularjs at non trivial cost, I wonder about long term viability of Spring under Broadcoms stewardship. I still feel very safe choosing spring boot ecosystem, just less so.

I will also say that I have seen drift in my gradle builds as @frankel.ch mentions in his article, where my simple gradle build turned into a monster because another dev was amazed by all he could do in gradle! Simple 50 line build became 500 line monster. Wouldn't happen in Maven.

Long time java dev whose XML fatigue facilitated move from ANT straight to Gradle years ago, but lately using more Maven (standard, just works). I still use Gradle for my projects where I integrate Angular app into my Spring Boot projects and keep it all in a single repo.

I've considered moving a few Spring Boot codebases I've worked on to the modular monolith approach. Not to head off microservices, but to incorporate the organizational and data hiding aspects into a growing code base.

Good article raising lots of interesting questions on long term viability of blue sky’s “openness”. Architecture still feels fuzzy to me but this article clears a lot up for me.

I’m in a position to utilize both. AI when I need immediate answer. Tutorial when I want to master a general topic. Both have a place in my coding journey.

Great tips for navigating code to understand. You may have mentioned it, but if you can tie code via commit history to original or latest story, you start to glean intent which gives a richer understanding.

Curate your feed. I had several accounts on Twitter targeting my interests. Nonsense could break in but I ignored it. Hoping bluesky makes ignoring the nonsense easier.