What exactly are emoji? Are they just small, silly images? If that's true, then why does pretty much every device, from an iPhone to an Android tablet, contain roughly the same set of them? Everything will be explained in the article - but before we can understand emoji, we have to start with the basics of text encodings in computers.

In the wake of Netflix' announcement that they are standardizing on Spring Boot as their microservice framework of choice, I thought it would be interesting to share some best practices that I personally discovered through many years of hands-on experience with Java's premiere application framework.

The Type-Safe Builder pattern is well understood when used within the confines of a single project. But what happens when you expose it as part of the public API of your module - how do you handle that API's evolution over time? This article covers that topic in great depth.