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Scala|Jun 24, 2026

Building Tools for an Unlimited Number of Edge Cases

Most developers build software for a specific customer. Tomasz Godzik works in a very different environment. As one of the engineers behind Scala open-source projects such as Metals and the Scala 3 compiler, his users can be anyone - from developers inside large organizations to contributors on the other side of the world. We talked about open source, development tooling, AI, and the kind of mindset required to solve problems that often have no documented solution.

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Business insights|Jun 23, 2026

Canton Network Through a Distributed Systems Lens

Canton Network is becoming increasingly popular in the fintech space. Here is what you need to know as an engineer willing to integrate and build on this distibuted ledger.

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Backend Engineering|Jun 18, 2026

JEP-538: native support for PEM format enabled

JEP-538 introduces the third preview of the PEM API. This API provides native support for decoding and encoding cryptographic objects in the Privacy-Enhanced-Mail (PEM) format, which is kind of an industry standard.

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Backend Engineering|Jun 4, 2026

Why Tooling Engineers Think Differently

Interview with Krzysztof Romanowski, Head of Development Productivity at VirtusLab Software engineering loves process, structure, best practices, and architectural purity. Tooling engineering often lives somewhere else entirely - in edge cases, uncomfortable tradeoffs, and systems that only work because somebody deeply understands how they break. We sat down with Krzysztof Romanowski to talk about why tooling engineers often think very differently from the rest of the industry.

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Artificial Intelligence|Jun 3, 2026

GitHub All-Stars vol.17: CodeBurn - The $200/Day Therapy Session Your Terminal Didn't Know It Needed

A slightly unsettling realization hit us at VirtusLab not long ago - our collective list of starred GitHub repositories had quietly ballooned into something that could generously be called "a problem." Instead of pretending it wasn't happening, we decided to lean into it: every two weeks, we pick a trending open-source project, pull the hood off, and tell you what we find underneath. We focus on fresh, relatively unknown repos - not the usual suspects that everybody and their tech newsletter already covered (because let's be honest, you don't need us for that).

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Scala|May 28, 2026

The Engineers Behind the Engineers

Interview with Jerzy Muller, Scala Evangelist & Dev Tooling Expert at VirtusLab Sometimes Google returns zero results. That’s usually where tooling engineers begin their work. In large-scale engineering organizations, their job is to make impossible systems work together and keep thousands of developers unblocked when everything starts breaking at scale. We sat down with Jerzy Müller, Scala Evangelist and Dev Tooling Expert at VirtusLab, to talk about what this work actually looks like behind the scenes.

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Scala|May 13, 2026

Our impressions from the Scala Survey 2026

Explore key insights from the Scala Survey 2026, including Scala 3 adoption rates, popular libraries, tooling preferences, and industry trends shaping the future of the Scala ecosystem.

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Artificial Intelligence|May 12, 2026

We're Building on Quicksand, and Most Teams Don't Know It

Tomek Lelek and I wrote Vibe Engineering because we kept seeing the same mistake everywhere: teams confusing the speed of generation with the speed of delivery. Vibe coding, that intuition-first, prompt-driven mode where you accept what the AI gives you without deep verification, is genuinely valuable. It's the digital sketchpad. It's how you turn a foggy idea into a working interface in an afternoon. I use it. You probably should too.

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Scala|Apr 30, 2026

Introduction to Scala 3's Capture Checking and Separation Checking

Languages like Rust mitigate these problems through ownership and lifetimes. But how do we bring these ideas into a GC-based language like Scala in a way that doesn't break existing programs? In other words, we want to track access rights (capabilities) to resources (objects in the object-capability model), while leaving memory management to the GC. Scala 3's answer is Capture Checking + Separation Checking.

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Backend Engineering|Apr 29, 2026

Supply Chain Attacks: How They Work and How to Defend Your Codebase against Them

Software supply chain security is a problem which, if ignored, can easily cause anything ranging from a minor bug to a literal disaster. Should we be scared? What can we do to be safe? This article will do its best to answer these questions briefly, while still doing justice to how serious the danger is. As a bonus, I will also mention how a build tool called Bazel can help in the fight.

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Artificial Intelligence|Apr 29, 2026

Visdom: AI Works Great. At Level Four.

AI adoption gaps stem from a missing common vocabulary. A maturity matrix with five levels and four perspectives helps organizations honestly assess where they truly stand.

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Artificial Intelligence|Apr 21, 2026

Visdom: Shadow AI Is Already in Your Codebase

This is post #4 in The Agent-Ready SDLC series. In post #1 we laid out the Ferrari-in-a-Fiat-500 problem - the engine is great, the chassis isn't. In post #2 we covered the first bottleneck: context. In post #3 we covered the second: feedback loops. Now we're at the third piece - and it's the one nobody wants to talk about.

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