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Henry Brown's Notes on the JVMHenry Brown's Notes on the JVM

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About

Hi, I'm Henry Brown 👋

I'm a software developer based in Cape Town, South Africa, where I lead software development at Grapevine Interactive. I've spent much of my career building backend systems on the JVM, with a particular passion for Kotlin, Java, Spring Boot, modern concurrency, messaging, distributed systems, and, more recently, AI-powered applications.

This blog is where I document what I learn.

Rather than trying to cover every technology under the sun, I prefer to write practical, example-driven articles about topics I've used in real projects or explored in depth. If something helps me become a better developer, there's a good chance it'll eventually find its way here.

My goal is simple:

Write the kind of technical articles I wish I'd found when I was learning something new.

Rather than focusing on theory, I try to explain why something works, when you should use it, the trade-offs involved, and how to apply it in production systems.

Currently Exploring

Technology never stands still, and neither do I. At the moment, I'm particularly interested in:

  • Modern Kotlin concurrency patterns
  • Spring Boot 4
  • AI-powered developer tooling
  • Apple Foundation Models and on-device AI
  • The Model Context Protocol (MCP)
  • High-performance backend architecture
  • Building better developer experiences on the JVM

Many of the articles you'll see here begin as experiments while exploring one of these topics.

What You'll Find Here

Most of my articles focus on backend development on the JVM, including:

  • Kotlin
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Coroutines and modern concurrency
  • Software architecture and design
  • AI and developer tooling
  • Messaging and distributed systems
  • Performance and JVM internals
  • Testing and developer productivity

Although many examples use Kotlin, the concepts are generally applicable to developers working anywhere in the JVM ecosystem.

Find Me Around the Web

If you'd like to see more of what I'm working on, you can also find me here:

Join the Kotlin Backend Guild

If you're building backend systems with Kotlin, I'd love for you to join the Kotlin Backend Guild on daily.dev.

The Kotlin Backend Guild is a community for developers building production backend systems with Kotlin. We discuss topics including:

  • Spring Boot
  • Ktor
  • Quarkus
  • Gradle and Maven
  • JPA, Hibernate, Exposed and jOOQ
  • Spring AI and AI-powered applications
  • Testing, architecture and performance
  • Modern backend development on the JVM

Whether you're just getting started with Kotlin or building large-scale production systems, you're very welcome to join the conversation.

Visit the squad

https://daily.dev/squads/kotlinbackendguild

Join the squad

https://dly.to/fYtyvlbK0Mj

Thanks for Visiting

Whether you're here to learn something new, solve a tricky problem, or simply explore what's possible with Kotlin and the JVM, I hope you find something useful.

If one of my articles saves you a few hours, teaches you something new, or inspires a different way of approaching a problem, then this blog has achieved exactly what I hoped it would.

Thanks for stopping by, and happy coding!

— Henry Brown