Featured Foojay Authors for November 2026: Geertjan Wielenga and Ricardo Mello

Foojay wouldn’t exist without the many contributions from its community, whether it’s a single post or an ongoing stream of knowledge sharing. That’s why we highlight two of them each month as Featured Authors. After Bazlur and Nicolas in October, November belongs to Geertjan Wielenga and Ricardo Mello. Want to read more from either of them? Click their name to visit their Foojay author page, where you’ll find their full list of posts.

Geertjan Wielenga

Geertjan Wielenga is a Java Champion, an Apache Member, and the leader of the Amsterdam Java User Group. He has been part of Foojay from the very beginning as the “Father of Foojay”: his first post, foojay: A Place for Friends Of OpenJDK, dates from April 2020, and he has since contributed close to a hundred posts. Many of them keep the community running: the Friends Of OpenJDK schedules at FOSDEM, the virtual JUG tours, and the status reports that show where the platform is heading.

Lately his writing has turned into hands-on exploration. There is a run of posts on observability, from zero to OpenTelemetry to observing Apache NetBeans with OpenTelemetry and Dash0. He also went through a Temporal.io workshop on durable execution and shared what he learned.

And then there is DuckDB. Embedding DuckDB in a Maven app, replacing in-memory loops in Spring Batch, running its JDBC driver in a GraalVM native image, and NetBeans DataWrangler form a series worth reading in order, and more is on the way.

Ricardo Mello

Ricardo Mello is a Senior Software Engineer focused on Java, Kotlin and MongoDB, helping developers build secure, scalable, and cloud-native applications. He joined Foojay in June 2025, and in that time has published 17 posts, a steady stream of practical, code-first guides.

His archive starts with the foundations: MongoDB’s aggregation framework for beginners, clean and modular Java with a hexagonal architecture, and a two-part look at Hibernate ORM with MongoDB. Operational topics follow, such as the MongoDB 8.0 migration guide and what to know before you shard a collection.

A second thread is search and AI: the three-part Beyond Keywords series on semantic, vector and hybrid search in Java, building a Kotlin app with Spring Boot and MongoDB Search, and the three-part agentic warehouse management system built with Java and Spring AI.

Thanks, and see you in December

Thanks to Geertjan and Ricardo for everything they’ve shared here, and to everyone else writing on Foojay. If you’d like to see your own name in one of these posts, all it takes is a first article: see how to submit your next article on foojay.io. We’ll be back with the next Featured Authors at the beginning of December.