Java records are available since JDK 16. They represent a simplified and restricted variant of a Java class and form their public API on the arguments passed to their constructor. Let's explore their traits by writing a simple, yet fully functional library, for solving optimization problems and learn a few things along the way.

I did a presentation on Phonetic Matching with Apache Solr some time ago. The slide deck is now available at Slideshare. The presentation introduces the challenges of phonetic matching using Soundex and its variations. We'll learn about the limitations of Soundex algorithms before moving on to the Beider-Morse algorithm. The slide decks shows how to integrate Beider-Morse into your Solr setup and discusses its benefits as part of an evaluation performed on a large set of real-world data.

Version 3.3.0 of Kafka for JUnit has been released. It increases all Kafka dependencies to 3.3.1 and features a couple of small improvements and bugfixes that were introduced into the codebase as part of the Hacktoberfest 2022. A big shoutout to all the lovely people that contributed to the project!