Small fixes, environment tricks, and the patterns I keep reaching for.https://vmcforge.dev/https://vmcforge.dev/essays/observability-microservices-spring-fastapi-langchain-kubernetes/https://vmcforge.dev/essays/observability-microservices-spring-fastapi-langchain-kubernetes/Three services, three runtimes, one request. When it fails, you need logs, metrics, and a distributed trace that all share the same correlation ID — so the question 'what happened?' has a single answer, not four parallel grep sessions.Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vmcforge.dev/notes/exception-handling-rest-api-spring-fastapi/https://vmcforge.dev/notes/exception-handling-rest-api-spring-fastapi/After twenty years of code review, the same pattern breaks teams: exceptions get swallowed or leaked raw. A centralized handler with a clear contract fixes both — and works the same way in Spring and FastAPI.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vmcforge.dev/essays/local-kubernetes-minikube-k9s/https://vmcforge.dev/essays/local-kubernetes-minikube-k9s/Iterating against a remote Kubernetes cluster means a build-push-deploy cycle on every change. Minikube gives you real clusters on your machine — several of them — where you can test the full deployment path without consequences.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vmcforge.dev/essays/dev-environment-from-scratch-sdkman-pyenv-nvm/https://vmcforge.dev/essays/dev-environment-from-scratch-sdkman-pyenv-nvm/Before you write a single line of code, you need to be able to switch between language versions without thinking. This is how I set that up.Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT