Latest insights, best practices and expertise from software development, AI and digital transformation.
Articles by
Founder & Software Architect
Software architect, engineer and entrepreneur. Patrick has been building products and platforms for over a decade — from enterprise backends and cloud-native infrastructure to AI-powered applications. As founder of encircle360, he combines deep technical expertise with entrepreneurial vision, driving open source projects that create real impact.
47 articles
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CI jobs execute third-party code next to a privileged Docker daemon — an unnecessary risk on a shared host kernel. We moved our Gitea Actions runners to Kata Containers and documented the five pitfalls nobody warns you about.
AI agents need a declarative contract – just like APIs need OpenAPI. Discover how ADL (Agent Definition Language), the A2A protocol, the Inference Gateway, and Spring Boot enable production-ready agent infrastructure – from code generation through OCI images to Kubernetes and GitOps.
AI agents are more than a clever chatbot: they plan, call tools and work through multi-step tasks. Turning that into reliable software takes orchestration — and it doesn't have to happen in Python. With Spring AI, LangChain4j and Quarkus, the Java ecosystem has reached a point in 2025/2026 where agent systems can be cleanly integrated into existing enterprise landscapes. This article shows what matters when it comes to architecture.
Adding AI capabilities to a Java backend used to mean building infrastructure from scratch. Spring AI changes the game — with familiar Spring principles and provider-agnostic abstractions.
We show how we secure our Spring Boot services as an OAuth2 Resource Server with Keycloak -- from the security configuration and JWT validation to method-level security and testing.
Helmfile for declarative deployments and Kyverno for policy enforcement complement each other ideally in a GitOps workflow. We show how we bring both together in our CI pipeline.
In distributed systems, network failures and retries are inevitable. Idempotent APIs ensure that repeated requests do not produce unwanted side effects -- a pattern we use in every microservice.
Running containers and VMs on a single platform -- without separate hypervisor hosts. How we built a converged infrastructure with K3s, KubeVirt, and NixOS on bare metal that unifies both worlds.
Why we chose Nix Flakes and direnv over Docker Compose for local development environments -- and how this leads to faster, lighter, and more reproducible dev setups.
After four years of experience with GraalVM Native Images, we know the typical pitfalls -- from reflection issues to missing resources to debugging without JVM tools. A field report.
With a single property, Spring Boot 3.2+ makes Virtual Threads available -- we show the migration, compare benchmarks with platform threads, and explain when switching is worthwhile.
Three and a half years after our first self-hosting article, our stack has evolved significantly. An overview of the open-source tools running on our K3s clusters in 2024.