Featured Foojay Authors for October 2026: Bazlur Rahman and Nicolas Fränkel

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 Marit and Graeme in September, October belongs to Bazlur Rahman and Nicolas Fränkel. 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.

Bazlur Rahman

Bazlur Rahman is a Java Champion, an editor here at Foojay, and one of the people whose work you’ve probably read without realizing it: 89 posts since 2021, many of them interviews with other Java Champions that gave the community a voice long before this spotlight existed. He’s also the founder and moderator of the Java User Group in Bangladesh, an MVB at DZone, and an editor for the Java Queue at InfoQ.

The archive splits into a few threads. One is deep, patient explainers on concurrency: a comprehensive guide to virtual threads, and later diagnosing and mitigating pinning once people actually started hitting it in production. Another is the interview series — conversations with Cay Horstmann, Sebastian Daschner, and Simon Martinelli among many others, each one a window into how a different Java Champion actually thinks about the ecosystem.

More recently he’s been building things, not just writing about them. java.evolved is a tool he built to visually diff how Java itself has changed release to release, and Sustainability for Java Developers is a collaborative guide he helped bring together for the Foojay community. His newest thread is AI from a Java developer’s seat rather than a spectator’s: building FormPilot, an AI-powered form filler with RAG, LangChain4j and Ollama, and building robust AI applications with LangChain4j guardrails and Spring Boot.

Nicolas Fränkel

Nicolas Fränkel needs almost no introduction on Foojay: with 254 posts, he is one of the site’s most prolific contributors, publishing on his own blog roughly every week since 2021 and syndicating every one of them here. He focuses on cloud-native technologies, DevOps, CI/CD and system observability, and is the author of several books on the JVM and software architecture — his “Software Architect Elevator” writing on moving between the engine room and the boardroom is a recurring theme across the archive.

What makes his recent output worth following is how fast it turned toward agentic AI as an engineering practice rather than a trend to comment on. In the last few months alone: building an AI agent from scratch, designing a team of agents, experimenting with AI subagents, writing an agent skill, and AI gateways: why and how — five posts that together read like a field diary of someone actually putting these tools to work, not just reading about them.

The rest of the archive is just as practical: one tip for successful OpenTelemetry projects, making illegal state unrepresentable, and solving Gradle metadata and Renovate integration are the kind of posts you bookmark because you know you’ll hit the exact same problem eventually. And then there’s the side of his writing that has nothing to do with Java at all — a seasons time-lapse built and explained across three posts, and AI-assisted genealogy, proof that the same curiosity that drives the technical posts shows up everywhere else too.

Thanks, and see you in November

Thanks to Bazlur and Nicolas 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 November.