Part 9 of 10 of Building Instagram's Authentication Backend . If you're just joining, the repo is here and you can catch the earlier parts on the YouTube playlist . Eight parts of code, zero runs By the end of part 8, every layer of this backend existed: DTOs, exceptions, entities, repositories, five services, a security filter chain and a controller. And I had never started the application. Not once. Everything so far was code I'd reasoned through and believed would work. This part is where that belief gets tested. We containerize the app, put Postgres, Redis and a fake mail server next to it, and bring all four up with one command. It did not work the first time, so this post is the real debugging session, with each bug, its symptom and its fix. If you're containerizing your own Spring Boot app, there's a good chance you'll hit at least one of these. In this post: A multi-stage Dockerfile for Spring Boot, line by line A docker-compose.yml ...
Introduction In real Java applications, we rarely work with just one value. Most of the time, we deal with: A list of users A set of permissions A map of IDs and objects A queue of tasks Handling such data using normal variables is not possible. This is where Java Collections come into the picture. Java Collections are ready-made data structures provided by Java to store, manage, and process multiple objects easily and efficiently. Understanding Java Collections is extremely important for: Backend development Real-world applications Java interviews Before starting interview preparation, it’s important to follow a structured Java backend developer roadmap so you don’t miss core fundamentals. Java Backend Developer Roadmap 2026 Why Java Collections Are Needed Before Java Collections, developers used arrays . Arrays have multiple problems: Fixed size (cannot grow or shrink) No built-in methods for sorting or searching Difficult to manage large and dynamic data...