Was positively surprised by the Art of Action by Stephen Bungay. The book explores the delicate balance of plans, actions and results in larger organisations. One of the interesting points is that in certain aspects military thought and tradition is surprisingly more advanced than the business one - having to deal with large scale coordination 1-2 hundred years ahead of the corporations (napoleonic wars v 1970’s for the corporate world). In this sense, the bigger corporations trying to stay lean and agile should rather take the lessons from the advanced military institutions rather than try to emulate the inappropriate “startup” mentality.

Beware: this post is WIP. An an enterprise developer, it’s easy to get used to the conveniences of Spring (Boot) so much that it becomes an issue on itself. Take @Transactional. Arguably, one of the few core features of Spring that does make us more productive in development. But at times it can be slightly inconvenient to rely solely on annotation for transaction boundary setup: It might not be desireable to have a database transaction open throughout the whole request processing, e.