Thirteen years of blogging
Are you struggling with performance issues in your Spring, Jakarta EE, or Java EE application?
Imagine having a tool that could automatically detect performance issues in your JPA and Hibernate data access layer long before pushing a problematic change into production!
With the widespread adoption of AI agents generating code in a heartbeat, having such a tool that can watch your back and prevent performance issues during development, long before they affect production systems, can save your company a lot of money and make you a hero!
Hypersistence Optimizer is that tool, and it works with Spring Boot, Spring Framework, Jakarta EE, Java EE, Quarkus, Micronaut, or Play Framework.
So, rather than allowing performance issues to annoy your customers, you are better off preventing those issues using Hypersistence Optimizer and enjoying spending your time on the things that you love!
Thirteen years later!
Thirteen years ago today, I created this blog on WordPress.com because I wanted to share some best practices I discovered while developing various web and enterprise applications with both Java and .NET.
Prior to LLMs and AI tools, developers relied on Google and StackOverflow to find answer to their problems, and both blogging and answering StackOverflow questions were a very way to build your personal brand.
Nowadays, fewer and fewer developers get to read blog posts, yet it’s still useful to share your findings, even if your audience will be greatly reduced.
Blog traffic in 2026
To back my previous claims, check out the StackOverflow traffic stats from 2008 to 2026:
A similar image has been circulating on LinkedIn and X for over two years now, and people were very surprised to find out that most of the traffic moved from websites to LLMs.
In fact, a similar pattern can be seen on many blogs, mine included:
LLMs are, indeed, eating out the world!
However, even if traffic has dropped, I still find blogging very useful because it has helped me became a better writer. In school, I was an average student in Linguistics for both Romanian, English, and French. I was born with absolutely no talent in writing. Math and physics were easier for me. Romanian and English were very difficult. In fact, when I was admitted to the most prestigious high school in my home town, my grade in Math was 9.75 (out of 10) and in Romanian, it was 8.05, and that was after one year of studying heavily for both.
When I started blogging, I knew I would suck at it, and I was fine with that since I thought that my audience would be more interested in the tech-related stuff, rather than caring about my writing style.
However, as fate would have it, practice makes you better even when you lack any particular skills. So, I owe blogging a lot, and, as a blog author, I don’t think you should stop writing just because the traffic stats went to the floor.
In the age of AI, being able to articulate what you want to express is a very valuable skill. Moreover, being able to write in your own authentic style is extremely valuable.
Right at this very moment, instead of spending 2 hours writing this blog post, I could just go to an LLM and ask it to generate this blog post on my behalf. Yet, I still choose to write it down by myself, for the same reason Confucius said in this quote:
“Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you.”
— Confucius
I hate reading AI-generated text. Every time I see it on social media, blog posts, or emails, I just ignore it. And, if more people are going to have the same reaction as mine, then I’m convinced that being authentic is going to be a rare skill that will be very appreciated in the next years.
So, keep on writing!
Other stats
Every year, on this very day, I like to write a report about the achievements that were made possible through this blog.
If you are curious about my previous reports, check out the following list:
In 13 years, I have managed to publish 632 articles, which generated over 25 million views from almost 13.3 million visitors.
Social media
Whether it’s investing, working with distributed systems, or branding, you should never “put all your eggs in a one basket”.
Even if blogging traffic went down, I still have the social media channels that I’ve grown over the past 13 years in association to my blog.
Since the 2025 anniversary, I have managed to increase my X audience from 88.7k followers to 93.8k.
And, over the past 5 years, I managed to close the gap between X and LinkedIn, so since the 12th anniversary, my LinkedIn follower count has grown from 82k to 87.7 followers.
High-Performance Spring Persistence
This year, I finished the High-Performance Spring Persistence video course, which is also available on Inflearn in Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese.
Spring Boot Training
I also created a new 3-day Spring Boot training and managed to run 3 editions of it that were very well received. So, if you are interested in getting the best out of Spring Boot, Spring framework, Spring Data JPA, Security, Modulith, Microservices, Actuator, Integration, and building GraalVM native images, then you are going to love this training.
I plan on creating a video course for this training as well, so stay tuned for more news!
Hypersistence Optimizer
Started in 2019, Hypersistence Optimizer has been detecting Hibernate issues in hundreds of companies all over the globe.
Over the past year, I managed to release support for Hibernate ORM 7.3 and 7.2, and the next version that I’m going to release in a few days is going to add support for an embedded web app that will allow you to see the events over time and spot both improvements and regressions.
The more code is generated by AI tools, the more you will need to use linters and automatic check tools that can enforce quality and performance rules in a deterministic way.
PhD
Last year, I started my research into the field of Automatic Data Performance Tuning at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, and managed to write three articles that are in review at the moment, and I’ll share them as soon as they get published.
Thanks for reading my blog, and stay tuned for more!
