Featured Foojay Authors for September 2026: Marit van Dijk and Graeme Robinson

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 Igor and Steve in July, and Cristobal and Shai in August, September belongs to Marit van Dijk and Graeme Robinson. 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.

Marit van Dijk

Marit van Dijk is a Java Champion, a Developer Advocate at JetBrains, and one of the longest-running contributors in this spotlight so far: 24 posts on Foojay since 2022, and one of the most-read author archives on the site.

Most of her writing is about the part of the job that happens around the code, and it is relentlessly practical. There is a whole shelf of IntelliJ IDEA craft: using Git interactive rebase, cherry-picking a commit onto another branch, committing only part of a file, working with GitLab merge requests, bookmarks, and even presenting from your IDE. A second thread runs through dependencies and the security that comes with them: managing and analyzing Maven and Gradle dependencies, finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and letting bots keep your dependencies updated.

What makes the archive worth browsing beyond the tool tips is the writing about developing as a skill. Tips for reading code starts from the observation that we read far more code than we write, and turns that into technique. How to create an open source pull request is the post to send someone who wants to contribute but has never opened a PR against a stranger's repository. And Unexpected things that make you a senior developer, which we wrote together, is about the production database you dropped on a Friday afternoon and what it taught you.

Most recently she wrote about command completion in IntelliJ IDEA, the feature that lets you find IDE actions by typing a dot instead of remembering a shortcut, and she joined Anton Arhipov and Dmitry Jemerov on the podcast for 25 years of IntelliJ IDEA. Her timing is also excellent: IntelliJ IDEA Conf 2026, the free virtual event she invited everyone to, runs on September 8 and 9 — which is tomorrow.

Graeme Robinson

Graeme Robinson is a Senior Staff Developer Advocate at MongoDB and the newest voice in this spotlight. He started writing on Foojay in March 2026, which is exactly why he's here: his posts are among the best technical writing on the site that not enough people have read yet.

His first post, Event-driven architecture in Java and Kafka, walks through reactive Java — Mono, Flux and flatMap — by building an air traffic control example twice, once with the reactive streams MongoDB driver and once with the synchronous one, so you can see what reactive code actually buys you.

Since June he has been publishing Aggregation Optimization in MongoDB, a five-part series subtitled "and why MongoDB might be a better relational database than you ever realized." It's a rare thing: a genuine field case study rather than a feature tour. A team new to MongoDB modelled and queried their data in a very RDBMS-like way, their aggregation pipeline missed its SLA, and Graeme sat down with them in a design review. The series is that pipeline being taken apart stage by stage:

• Part 1: A case study from the field — the use case, and what every stage of the original pipeline was trying to do.
• Part 2: Unnecessary unwinds — the stage that looked essential and wasn't.
• Part 3: Optimizing many-to-many relationships — modelling profiles against the devices they watch on.
• Part 4: Data duplication to improve read performance — deliberately storing the same value twice, and when that's the right call.
• Part 5: Sorting with indexes — the last piece, published at the start of this month.

If you have ever inherited a query that was fast on a laptop and slow in production, read it from Part 1.

Thanks, and see you in October

Thanks to Marit and Graeme 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 October.

• Foojay

Frank Delporte

Author

Frank Delporte is a Java Champion, Java Developer, Senior Technical Writer at Azul, Blogger, Author of "Java Programming for Raspberry Pi - A Hands-On Guide to Electronics and IoT Projects", and Open-Source Contributor for Pi4J, MelodyMatrix, Lottie4J, Sheetmusic4J,... Frank writes and talks about Java in business production environments, but also in places people don’t always expect it, on the Raspberry Pi, driving GPIO pins, rendering JavaFX UIs, and running on RISC-V single-board computers.